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Roast Loin of Pork
Wipe a five-pound loin of pork (little pig if possible); sprinkle with salt, pepper, powdered sage and dredge with flour. Place in dripping pan, surround with some of the fat cut in small cubes. Set to cook in a moderate oven for four hours, basting every ten minutes for the first half hour and afterwards every fifteen minutes, with dripping in pan. Remove to serving platter, surround with Apple Rings and make a gravy same as for other roast meats.
A straightforward roast, but the four-hour cooking time belongs to an era with different worries about pork. That is the one instruction to reconsider.
- The timing is the hingeFour hours at 350F will take a five-pound loin far past done and dry it out completely. Modern practice is to roast to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest point and rest 10 minutes, which for a bone-in loin of this size runs roughly 1 hour 20 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes. The long cooking here reflects fear of trichinella, a parasite that is essentially absent from commercially raised pork today.
- Moderate oven350F. A few recipes of this period use "moderate" for anything from 325F to 375F; for a loin, 350F is right, or start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the crust and then drop to 350F.
- "Little pig if possible"A loin from a young, small animal, which would be leaner and finer-grained than a mature hog. Any supermarket bone-in pork loin roast works; ask for the rib end, which stays moister than the sirloin end.
- Dredge with flourA light dusting, not a coating. It browns early and thickens the pan drippings.
- Basting every ten minutesModern pork loin is bred much leaner and there is little fat to render, so the pan may run dry. Basting every 20 to 30 minutes is enough, and each opening of the oven door costs heat. The cubes of fat scattered around the roast are worth keeping — they give you something to baste with.
- Powdered sageGround dried sage, the standard pork seasoning of the period. Use about a teaspoon for a five-pound roast; ground sage is more assertive than rubbed sage of the same volume.
- Apple RingsA separate recipe in this book, cross-referenced here. Any sauteed apple slices serve the same purpose against the fat of the meat.
- YieldA five-pound bone-in loin serves six to eight.
Roast pork with sage and apples is a long-established pairing in English and American cooking, the fruit's acidity cutting a rich fat-heavy joint, and pork was traditionally a cold-weather meat: hogs were slaughtered after the first hard frosts, when the weather itself would keep the fresh cuts. Anything not eaten quickly went into brine, smoke or lard. The four-hour roasting time is the most period-specific detail on the page. Trichinosis was widely publicized in late nineteenth-century America, and cookbook writers of the era generally called for pork cooked to a degree of doneness modern cooks would consider ruinous -- a habit that outlived the risk by the better part of a century.