Baked Chine
Rub the chine well with salt. Place into a dripping-pan with a large teacup of water. Put around the meat several medium-sized sweet potatoes. Keep the pan well covered, and cook until thoroughly done. Place the chine on a platter with the potato around it.
A plain covered roast of pork backbone with sweet potatoes cooked in the drippings. The only real difficulty is sourcing the cut and judging doneness, since the original gives neither temperature nor time.
- What a chine isThe chine is the backbone section of the hog, cut across with the meat left along it — closer to a rack of country-style ribs or a bone-in pork loin roast than to anything sold as "chine" today. A butcher will cut one on request; a 4-5 lb bone-in pork loin or shoulder roast stands in well.
- Dripping-pan and coverA dripping-pan is a shallow roasting pan. "Keep the pan well covered" is the hinge of the recipe: the teacup of water (about 6-8 oz) plus a tight lid or a sealed foil cover braise-roasts the meat so a bony, sinewy cut comes out tender rather than dry.
- Oven heatNo temperature or time is given at all. A covered pork roast of this kind wants 325-350F; figure roughly 25-30 minutes per pound, longer for shoulder.
- "Thoroughly done"Period cooks generally took pork well past what we would now call done; fear of trichinosis is often cited as one reason. A loin is at its best at 145F at the center with a short rest; shoulder and rib cuts need to go to 195-200F before the connective tissue gives way.
- SaltRubbing with salt an hour or more ahead — or the night before, refrigerated — seasons the meat far better than a rub applied at the oven door. Allow about 1 teaspoon of kosher salt per pound.
- The sweet potatoesMedium sweet potatoes, peeled or scrubbed and left whole, take 45-60 minutes in the covered pan. Add them partway through a long roast rather than at the start, or they collapse into the drippings.
- FinishingIf you want any browning, pull the cover for the last 20 minutes and raise the heat to 425F. The covered method alone produces a pale roast and a good deal of pan liquid, which is worth skimming and serving as it is.
- YieldA 4-5 lb roast with potatoes serves six to eight.
Chine was one of the standard butcher's terms of the American nineteenth-century hog-killing season, when a family that raised its own pig used every part, often in a customary sequence: the hams and sides went into cure, the fat went to lard and soap, and the bony pieces ch, spareribs, backbone, feet were eaten fresh within days because they would not keep. Baked chine belongs to that brief window of fresh pork, and it survived longest in the South, where backbone-and-sweet-potato dishes remained ordinary winter food long after most households stopped killing their own hogs. Compilations like this one printed such recipes in a very compressed form because the cut, the oven and the notion of "thoroughly done" needed no explanation to their readers; the sweet potatoes cook in the pork drippings.