A classic romance that’s all down to chemistry

Controlled putrefaction, plus a nitrate-free meat cure, equals fruity bliss

During the long period of the lockdown, I decided to clear out my office. The trouble was that I kept coming across old photos and documents that made me stop to read them. Among these was a book of our press cuttings spanning the first decade of The Sportsman from 1999. I stopped collecting after 10 years because it got too difficult to collect it all – plus in the back of my mind it I suppose it seemed a bit vain. Being young and precious is acceptable, but older and precious is not a good look.

A cutting that took me by surprise was an old one from The Telegraph in December 2006. There is a picture of me holding up some hams outside the kitchen. The article was about me curing hams from the farm over the road, with the salt from the sea. It seems everybody is doing things like this now, but back in 2006 it was very cutting-edge, well worthy of the headline, “Hang ’em high”.

In the article it mentions that I would sniff these hams daily. I didn’t really think about this, but their smell was intoxicating: both sweet and savoury, it fascinated me.

When I showed the project to our local environmental health officer, she was as fascinated as I was – I will always remember her saying with delight: “Ah, controlled putrefaction!”

I thought this was such an interesting phrase, implying that you are allowing something to rot but making sure that the microbes that are causing the rotting are the right ones to produce something delicious, while also deterring pathogens.

The reason I mention this is because this week’s recipes concern melon – the perfect partner for ham. But why is this the case? It seems that over the months when cured hams are maturing, they slowly develop long chains of flavour molecules, which are the same as those found in ripe melons.

I found this interesting because I thought it might suggest a definitive way to tell whether a melon is ripe. (The disappointment of getting home and opening up your melon to find it is unripe is a big one in my world.)

It seems that because melons do not store starch, there is nothing intrinsically there in the fruit that will help it to ripen and develop sweetness after picking. In other words, if you’ve made a bad choice, you are stuck with it.

There are visual clues to ripeness that can help, such as a slightly darker and rougher skin, but – and I appreciate this is a bit tricky in these distancing times – the answer is to give them a good sniff. A ripe melon will be radiating its ripeness.

METHOD

For today’s column, I thought I would try to do something a bit different. The classic partner for melon is Parma ham, so why is it so rarely served with a great Spanish Iberico ham, which I often prefer to the Italian variety?

I remembered that one of the reasons I like Parma ham is that the laws under which it must be produced forbid the use of nitrates. These have been linked to a small increase in the risk of colon cancer. I hadn’t used nitrates to produce my hams, preferring to let my nose tell me if something was wrong in the curing process, and throwing away any that smelt wrong.

When I consulted Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, he pointed out that the use of nitrates can inhibit the development of fruity tastes in ham, (arising, remember, from the same chemicals as those found in a ripe melon).

I thought I would experiment so I bought some Iberico ham and some from Parma to try with melon. Sure enough, the latter worked much, much better. The Iberico was delicious but had a certain bitterness that clashed with the melon.

So it may not be a big news story worthy of a banner headline, but it seems that the story is: “Parma Ham still best with melon”.

I would sniff the hams daily. Their smell, both sweet and savoury, was intoxicating