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Corned Beef and Ham

Boiled corned beef and ham served with bread crumbs, cloves, and parsley garnish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,768 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Corned Beef and Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meats

  1. Tie the corned beef firmly to keep its shape.

Boil

  1. Place the beef in a kettle nearly full of cold water and boil gently for 5 to 6 hours until done.

  2. Boil the ham in the same manner.

Finish and serve

  1. Remove the rind from the ham and sprinkle it with fine bread or cracker crumbs.

  2. Insert the cloves into the ham and bake quickly to brown it.

  3. If serving whole, garnish with parsley.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  3. Beef + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Beef + hamtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,729 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Bread + parsleytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,588 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Corned beef
Provides the main cured meat and flavor; long gentle boiling makes it tender.
Ham
Adds a second cured meat; boiling first keeps it moist before the final browning.
Fine bread or cracker crumbs
Forms a crisp, browned crust on the ham surface during baking.
Cloves
Adds a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the ham's surface.

The step that matters

Bake the ham quickly to brown it. The ham is already cooked by boiling, so the final bake only needs to be hot and brief. Too long or too cool an oven dries the meat and fails to brown the crumb crust.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, ham, bread, parsley):

  1. Marjoramfits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Pepperfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, ham, bread, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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