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PIG, SUCKING (a la Francaise)
Wipe the pig quite dry inside and out, and stuff it with a forcemeat prepared as follows. Shred half a pound of beef suet very finely, mix with it half a pound of grated bread-crumbs, and add a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, eight sage-leaves, minced, and a little pepper and salt. Bind the mixture together with the well-beaten yolks of two eggs and a table-spoonful of milk, if necessary. Sew up the slit securely, and roast the pig until it is three parts cooked. Take it down, put it on one side, and cut it up into neat pieces. Place these in a stewpan, barely cover them with a little stock, and add a large Spanish onion finely minced, a dessert-spoonful of chopped lemon-rind, a little salt, grated nutmeg, and cayenne pepper, a bunch of parsley, and a pinch of powdered thyme. Stew these ingredients gently together for an hour. Strain the sauce, and thicken it with a dessert-spoonful of brown thickening, or, failing this, with half an ounce of butter rolled in flour; add a dessert-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, and a tea-spoonful of anchovy sauce, with the stuffing made up into small balls. Stew a quarter of an hour longer, and serve the pig on a hot dish with the sauce poured over it. Probable cost of sucking-pig, 6s. to 9s. Sufficient for ten or twelve persons.
A two-stage Victorian treatment: the pig is stuffed and part-roasted, then jointed and finished in a spiced brown stew. The hinge is the roasting — stop while the meat is still visibly underdone, because the hour in the stewpan is what actually cooks it.
- Sourcing the pigA sucking (suckling) pig is a milk-fed animal of about 10-15 lb, sold whole with the head on. It must be ordered from a butcher in advance; nothing in a supermarket case substitutes. Ask for it dressed and scalded, with the belly slit for stuffing.
- "Three parts cooked"Stop the roast while the meat is still visibly underdone: the skin set and coloured but the joints still pink at the bone. The book gives neither an oven temperature nor a time, so judge by eye. The subsequent hour of gentle stewing, plus the final quarter hour, takes it well past the 145F pork needs, and overshooting at the roasting stage gives dry, stringy shoulder.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons; the table-spoonful is close enough to the modern one. Half a pound each of suet and crumbs is 225g each — a generous quantity of forcemeat, and any surplus rolls into the balls called for at the end.
- Beef suetShredded beef suet is sold packaged in Britain but is scarce elsewhere; ask a butcher for raw kidney suet and grate it frozen. Cold grated unsalted butter or lard is the usual stand-in, though the forcemeat will be softer.
- Brown thickeningThe Victorian pantry staple of flour browned dry or in fat until nut-coloured, effectively a dry roux kept in a jar. The recipe already gives the alternative: half an ounce (about 15g) of butter rolled in flour -- conventionally about its own weight of flour -- whisked into the strained sauce in pieces.
- Mushroom ketchup and anchovy sauceBoth are salty brown seasonings, not condiments in the tomato sense. Mushroom ketchup is still made commercially; a teaspoon of Worcestershire sauce or a little soy plus anchovy paste covers the same savoury ground. Season the sauce only after these go in.
- Sage and lemon rindEight sage leaves means fresh ones — about a rounded teaspoon chopped, or half that in dried. "Chopped lemon-rind" is finely minced zest with no pith; a dessert-spoonful is a lot, so use the zest of one large lemon and taste.
- Sewing and jointingA trussing needle and butcher's twine close the belly; the stuffing is meant to stay put through the roast, then be cut free and rolled into balls. Joint the part-roasted pig into shoulders, loin sections, legs and ribs so the pieces sit in one layer under the stock.
- Yield and costTen to twelve servings, as stated. The 6s. to 9s. price is a period retail note for the whole pig, not a modern guide.
Cassell's appears to place this among a run of sucking-pig methods — plain roast, stuffed, and this one "à la Française" — seemingly reflecting a Victorian assumption that a French treatment meant jointing and finishing in a well-seasoned brown sauce rather than sending the animal whole to table with an apple in its mouth. Whole sucking pig was a set-piece dish for large households and dinners of ten or more, and the two-stage method here may well have had a practical logic behind the culinary one: a part-roasted pig can be cut up, held, and finished in the stewpan at a time of the cook's choosing, which would matter when one range is serving a multi-course meal. The seasoning list — mushroom ketchup, anchovy sauce, lemon rind, cayenne and nutmeg — is thoroughly English despite the name, and belongs to the same nineteenth-century store-cupboard tradition that produced bottled sauces by the dozen. Suckling pig itself is far older than the book, and remains a Christmas and festival roast across Spain, Portugal, the Philippines and much of central Europe.