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Fillet of Pork,
Cut a fillet nicely and evenly from a fine leg of fresh pork. Take out the bone. Make a force-meat or stuffing of grated bread, or cracker crumbs and butter; mince together a teaspoonful of sweet marjoram and sage, each, or enough to make a tablespoonful when rubbed. Mix well together, and season with salt and pepper. Add the beaten yolk of two eggs to bind the ingredients together; then stuff firmly into the place from whence the bone was taken.
Score the skin of the pork in circles all around the fillet. Rub into them a little sage (powdered). Put the pork on the fire and roast slowly for several hours, or until quite done.
Baste the meat at first with little lard, to make the skin crisp, and afterward baste with its own gravy. When done, take the fat from the gravy, and thicken with little flour. Send the pork to the table with the gravy in a boat; and a little dish of apple sauce, made very thick, flavored with lemon, and sweetened well.
A boned and stuffed leg of fresh pork, roasted slowly with the rind scored for crackling. The method holds up; the vocabulary and the timings need translating.
- What a "fillet" means hereNot tenderloin. In nineteenth-century butchery the fillet of pork is the thick round of the fresh (uncured) leg — what a modern butcher sells as fresh ham, top round of leg, or leg roast. Ask for a 4-6 lb piece from the leg with the rind on, and have the bone removed but kept for the gravy.
- Fresh pork, not ham"Fresh pork" is the period's way of distinguishing unsalted, uncured leg from the cured ham that was far more common in the larder. Anything labelled ham today is cured and will not behave the same way.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; 'put the pork on the fire and roast slowly' describes hearth roasting. Adapting to a modern oven, a slow roast answers to roughly 325F, with a hotter start of about 425F for 20-25 minutes to set and blister the scored skin before dropping back.
- Time and doneness'Several hours' reflects an unreliable fire. Reckon on roughly 25-30 minutes per pound in a slow oven and cook to at least 145F in the thickest muscle, then rest 20 minutes. Because the cavity holds an egg-bound stuffing, check the centre of the stuffing separately and take it to 165F — which means the meat around it will finish well above 145F.
- Scoring the skinScore through the rind and into the fat but not into the meat, in parallel rings a finger's width apart. Dry the rind thoroughly first — a wet skin steams rather than crisps, whatever you baste it with.
- The herb quantitiesThe original's two measures do not quite agree: a teaspoonful each of marjoram and sage is less than the 'tablespoonful when rubbed' it offers as an alternative, and 'rubbed' suggests dried herb rather than fresh. If substituting dried for fresh, use noticeably less, since dried sage in particular is stronger than the fresh leaf.
- Stuffing proportionsThe recipe gives no volume. About 2 cups of soft breadcrumbs or crushed crackers, 3 tablespoons melted butter and two egg yolks makes a bindable mass; pack it firmly into the bone cavity and tie the joint with string at intervals so it does not push out.
- Basting fatLard is still sold and works exactly as intended. Any neutral fat will do for the first basting; after the first hour the rendered pork fat in the pan is better than either.
- Gravy and sauceSkim the fat, then whisk in a tablespoon or so of flour slaked in cold water and simmer a few minutes to lose the raw taste. The apple sauce is meant to be stiff, sharp with lemon and frankly sweet — it stands in for the acidity the meat lacks.
- YieldA 5 lb boned leg roast with stuffing serves eight to ten, with cold meat left over.
Stuffed and scored fresh pork leg was the festive alternative to salt-cured ham, and it belongs to autumn and winter cooking — the season when a pig was killed and there was fresh meat to be had before the rest went into brine or the smokehouse. The sage-and-marjoram forcemeat is inherited more or less directly from English roasting practice, where sage has been the standing partner to pork for centuries; the pairing is usually explained as a corrective to the meat's richness, and the sweetened apple sauce alongside does the same job from the other direction. The instruction to send the gravy to the table in a boat, with the sauce in its own small dish, reflects a period in which sauces were served separately for each diner to apportion rather than poured over the meat in the kitchen.