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Roast Spare-Rib
Trim off the rough ends neatly, crack the ribs across the middle, rub with salt and sprinkle with pepper, fold over, stuff with turkey-- dressing, sew up tightly, place in dripping-pan with pint of water, baste frequently, turning over once so as to bake both sides equally until a rich brown.
A stuffed rib roast written for a cook who knew her own stove, so the two things it omits are the oven temperature and the time. Both are recoverable from the method: a covered dripping-pan with a pint of water and frequent basting is moderate, steady roasting, not a hot blast.
- Oven temperatureSet 325-350F. Anything hotter dries the thin meat between the bones before the stuffing in the centre is hot through.
- What to buyA full pork spare-rib slab of 3 to 4 lb, in one piece with the flap intact, since you need enough surface to fold. Ask the butcher not to trim it St. Louis style; the rough ends the recipe tells you to remove are the very parts a modern butcher has often already cut away.
- "Crack the ribs across the middle"Score through the bones at the midpoint with a heavy knife or cleaver so the slab hinges without snapping. Without this the rack will not fold and the stuffing squeezes out.
- Turkey dressingThe recipe assumes you will turn to the book's own turkey dressing, which in books of this kind is generally a plain bread dressing: stale bread, butter, chopped onion, a herb such as sage, salt and pepper, moistened a little. Check the dressing recipe in this book rather than guessing. Something in the range of 3 to 4 cups will fill a slab this size; pack it loosely, not tight.
- Sewing upCotton kitchen twine and a trussing needle, or simply tie the folded slab at 2-inch intervals. Remove all twine before carving.
- The pint of waterIt is there to keep the drippings from scorching in a shallow pan, not to steam the meat. Top it up if it threatens to dry out, and use what is left as the base of a gravy.
- DonenessThis is the point the original cannot give you. Because the dressing is inside, cook until the centre of the stuffing reaches 165F, which will put the meat well past its own 145F mark. Reckon on 2 to 2 1/2 hours at 350F, checking from 1 3/4 hours.
- YieldA 3 to 4 lb stuffed slab serves four to five. Carve down between the bones, giving each portion a spoonful of the dressing.
Spare-rib was a butchering season dish. In the households Buckeye Cookery was written for — it came out of Ohio but circulated widely and was reissued from Minneapolis — hogs were killed in late autumn and the carcass worked through in order: the hams and sides went to salt and smoke, the fat to lard, and the ribs, which would not keep, were eaten fresh within days. That may be why the book roasts them plainly and why the stuffing appears to be borrowed wholesale from the turkey rather than invented for the pork. The instruction to fold and sew is plausibly a frugality of shape as much as flavour, turning a flat, awkward rack into something that could be sent to table looking like a joint. Note also that spare-rib here means the whole bony section, roasted and carved at the table; the idea of ribs as a sauced, hand-held food belongs to a later and largely separate American tradition.