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OLD-TIME FOOD FOR CONVALESCENTS
Roast good potatoes in hot ashes and coals; when done, put in a coarse cloth and squeeze with the hand, and take out the inside on a plate. Put a slice of good pickled pork on a stick three or four feet long, hold before a wood fire until it cooks slightly, then dip into a pan of water and let it drip on the potato to season it; repeat until the meat is nicely cooked on one side, then turn the other, dip in water, etc. When done place on plate beside the potato, serve with a slice of toast dressed with hot water and a little vinegar and salt, or use sweet cream instead of vinegar. A cup of sage tea, made by pouring boiling water on a few leaves of sage and allowing it to stand a few minutes, served with cream and sugar, is very nice; or crust coffee, or any herb tea is good. Food prepared in this way obviates the use of butter.
A complete invalid's meal for one, built entirely around the period conviction that butter was indigestible for the sick. Everything here is a substitute for it: the water dripped from the cooking pork, the hot water and vinegar on the toast, the cream in the tea.
- The hinge: the drippings are the seasoningDipping the pork in water and letting it drip over the potato is the whole point of the dish — it delivers salt and rendered fat without a pat of butter. If you cook the pork in a pan instead, spoon a little of the pan liquid over the potato to get the same effect.
- Roasting in ashesA whole potato buried in hot ashes and coals bakes slowly in an uneven, uncontrolled heat; the recipe gives no temperature. For a modern equivalent, bake unwrapped on a rack at about 425F for 50-60 minutes, until it gives to a squeeze.
- Squeezing in a clothThis breaks the flesh up and drives off steam, giving a dry, fluffy mash rather than a solid baked potato. Use a doubled tea towel and expect to burn your fingers unless you let it sit a minute first.
- Pickled porkNot the pink deli product but pork brine-cured at home in a crock, closer to today's salt pork or green (unsmoked) bacon. It is very salty; soak a slice in cold water for 20-30 minutes before cooking or the meal will be inedible to a modern palate.
- Cook the pork throughThe recipe starts with "cooks slightly," but the pork is meant to be finished on both sides. Take fresh or brine-cured pork to 145F at the centre; a thin slice held before a fire or laid in a dry pan reaches that quickly.
- Toast dressed with hot waterA once-common invalid dish, sometimes called water toast: dry toast moistened with boiling water and seasoned. Use only a few spoonfuls of water, enough to soften without collapsing the bread.
- Crust coffeeBread crusts toasted dark, then steeped in boiling water and strained — a caffeine-free stand-in for coffee, not a coffee drink. Sage tea is made the same way as any leaf infusion: a few leaves, boiling water, and a few minutes' standing, as the recipe says.
- YieldOne serving. Scale by the potato and the slice of pork.
American household manuals of the 1870s and 1880s often carried a chapter like this one, giving food for the sick its own section because nursing at home was ordinary domestic work and the cook was also the nurse. The medical thinking of the period held that butter and fried fat taxed a weak stomach, so invalid cookery leaned on dry toast, plain roast potato, and thin cured meat, with the fat delivered indirectly and in small amounts — hence the closing note that this method "obviates the use of butter." Sage tea and crust coffee belong to the same logic: warm, mildly flavoured, and free of the tea and coffee that were generally thought to over-stimulate a fever patient. The open-fire technique, with the meat on a three- or four-foot stick, is a reminder that such instructions were written for kitchens where a wood fire was still the working heat source, and that a sickroom meal was often cooked at the hearth rather than the range.