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Broiled Spareribs
Sprinkle salt and pepper over the ribs; place on a broiling iron over good hot coals; turn often, and when done place on a platter and send to the table. Very delicate and nice.
Three lines of instruction that assume a hearth, a hinged gridiron and a cook who knows pork. The gaps worth filling are the cut, the heat and how you know it is done.
- The hinged broilerThe broiling iron -- A "broiling iron" was a grate of iron bars on a long handle, set over the coals; some were hinged and double-sided so the whole thing could be flipped. A charcoal grill grate or an oven broiler with the rack 5 to 6 inches from the element does the same work.
- "Good hot coals" means grey, not flamingCoals ashed over and glowing, not a live fire. Live flame will scorch the fat cap long before the meat near the bone is cooked, and spareribs drip enough fat to cause flare-ups.
- Cut the rack into single ribs or short sectionsA whole sparerib slab is too thick to broil through without burning. Thin sections or separated ribs are what makes the constant turning practical.
- This is not barbecueDirect-heat broiling gives you cooked pork with a browned exterior, not the falling-apart texture of ribs held for hours at low heat. Expect meat with some chew.
- DonenessPork is safe at 145F internal with a three-minute rest. Reading a thin rib is awkward; go by the meat pulling back from the bone ends and clear juices, and check the thickest section with an instant-read thermometer if you can get the probe alongside the bone.
- Season with more convictionSalt and pepper alone is the whole seasoning here, so salt the ribs generously at least 30 minutes ahead and use coarsely cracked pepper, which stands up to the heat better than fine grind.
- YieldA 3 lb rack of spareribs, trimmed and cut into portions, feeds three or four as a main course.
Spareribs were a byproduct dish. On a farm that butchered its own hogs, the sides went to bacon and the hams to the smokehouse, and the rib bones — with relatively little meat clinging to them — were generally eaten fresh, since hog-killing was done in cold weather precisely to extend the keeping of the fresh cuts. That gave rise to a whole family of quick, unfussy rib preparations in nineteenth-century American cookbooks: broiled, fried, baked with dressing, or boiled with sauerkraut in German-settled districts. The brevity of this entry is itself the point.