Roast Pork
The loin, leg, shoulder, or fillet are nice for roasting. Prepare a stuffing as for fowl, seasoned with onion and sage. Cut the skin into small squares; or should the skin be taken off sprinkle with little fine sage. Baste often.
Four lines of instruction that assume the cook already knows how to roast a joint. The gaps worth filling are temperature, timing, and what to do about the skin.
- The hinge: score the skin before it goes near heat"Cut the skin into small squares" means scoring through the rind and into the fat but not the meat, at roughly 1 cm intervals. Rub the dry rind with salt; any moisture on the surface will steam rather than crisp it.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. A hot start (around 450F for 20-30 minutes) to blister the rind, then 325-350F for the remainder, works well. At the lower temperature a loin or fillet runs roughly 20 minutes per pound, but treat that as a guide only and go by internal temperature; shoulder needs far longer.
- DonenessWhole cuts of pork are done at 145F internal with a three-minute rest, which leaves the centre faintly pink. This is a real change from the grey, 185F pork of the period, when trichinosis was a genuine concern and modern herd management was not in place. Shoulder is the exception: take it to 195F so the connective tissue breaks down.
- Stuffing, and where to put it"As for fowl" means a bread stuffing: stale breadcrumbs, chopped onion softened in butter, plenty of chopped sage, salt, pepper, bound with egg. If it is packed inside a boned loin or shoulder, the stuffing itself must reach 165F, which will overcook a loin. Roasting the stuffing separately in a dish is the practical answer.
- "Fillet" is not the tenderloin"Fillet" is not necessarily the tenderloin -- in nineteenth-century usage "fillet of pork" often meant a boned joint taken from the leg rather than the tenderloin, though the term was not applied consistently, and this recipe lists leg and fillet separately. A modern pork tenderloin weighs under a pound and roasts in about 20 minutes; do not assume the two are interchangeable.
- BastingBaste the meat and the pan juices, not the rind. Liquid on scored skin softens it. If the skin has been removed, the sprinkle of fine sage stands in for the crackling as the flavour on the surface.
- YieldFigure 8 oz of bone-in roast or 6 oz boneless per person. A 4 lb loin serves six to eight with stuffing and gravy from the pan drippings.
Sage with pork is one of the oldest fixed pairings in English cookery, carried into American kitchens intact; the herb's resinous bitterness cuts fat, and it was also often said, in older folk tradition, to help the body manage a heavy meat. The instruction to prepare "a stuffing as for fowl" is a good marker of how these compendiums worked: the reader was expected to have read the poultry section and to carry the technique across rather than have it repeated. Pork was the workhorse meat of the American household well into the twentieth century, cheap to raise and easy to preserve, and a roast of fresh pork was the occasional treat among a year of ham, bacon and salt pork. The common instruction of the era to cook it until no trace of pink remained reflected real anxiety about trichinosis, a risk largely designed out of commercial pork since.