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PIG, SUCKING, BROILED (a la Tartare)
Cut the remains of a cold roast pig into neat slices, freed entirely from skin and gristle. Dip them into clarified butter, and afterwards into highly-seasoned bread-crumbs, and broil them over a clear fire until they are brightly browned. Serve the slices on a hot dish, with a sauce, made as follows, in a tureen. Mince a moderate-sized onion very finely, and fry it in half an ounce of butter until it is lightly browned. Season rather highly with pepper, pour two table-spoonfuls of vinegar over it, and boil all together for three minutes. Add a table-spoonful of flour mixed smoothly with half a pint of water, and half a tea-spoonful of Bovril. Boil these for a quarter of an hour. Stir in a table-spoonful of mixed mustard, a table-spoonful of Worcester sauce, and a tea-spoonful of anchovy. Serve very hot. When the shoulders of the pig are left untouched they are excellent broiled whole in this way, and curry or tomato sauce may be served with them, instead of the above. Time, ten minutes to broil the slices; half an hour to make the sauce. Probable cost, exclusive of the cold pig, 8d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A dish built for leftovers: yesterday's roast suckling pig, crumbed and grilled, with a sharp brown sauce alongside. The sauce takes three times as long as the meat, so start it first.
- "Broil" means grillIn a British book of this period broiling is cooking over or under direct radiant heat — a gridiron over coals, or a modern overhead broiler set high. The slices are already cooked, so the ten minutes is for colour and crust only; thin slices dry out fast, so cut them a good half-inch thick.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Some of it will boil away over the quarter-hour, so the finished sauce is thicker than the flour alone would make it.
- Bovril and anchovyBovril is a salty beef extract paste, still sold; a teaspoon of beef bouillon concentrate does the same job. "A tea-spoonful of anchovy" means anchovy essence, a thin bottled sauce — anchovy paste or a mashed salted fillet substitutes directly, though the paste is thicker and saltier.
- Mixed mustardNot dry mustard powder but mustard already made up with water or vinegar; English mustard is the likely intended flavour. A tablespoon of it is assertive.
- Clarified butterButterfat with the milk solids and water removed, so it will not burn or spit under the grill and will not make the crumbs sodden. Ghee works. Plain melted butter will scorch and the crumbs will speckle black.
- Highly-seasoned bread-crumbsDry crumbs mixed with salt and pepper, and possibly a little cayenne, nutmeg or dried herb; the recipe does not specify. Fresh soft crumbs crisp poorly under a grill; use dried or panko.
- "A la Tartare" hereThis is not the cold mayonnaise-based tartare sauce. In nineteenth-century usage à la Tartare meant crumbed, grilled, and served with something fiercely piquant — here an onion-and-vinegar brown sauce lifted with mustard, Worcester and anchovy.
- The whole shoulderIf you take up the suggestion of grilling a shoulder whole, ten minutes will not do it; the joint needs turning over moderate heat until heated through to the centre. Slices are the more practical reading of the recipe.
- YieldFour to five as written, and it scales by the amount of cold meat you have — the sauce quantity is generous for that number.
Cassell's carried a large number of recipes for what the Victorians called "rechauffés": ways of turning a cold joint into a dish that did not look like leftovers. A suckling pig was a set-piece roast, brought whole to the table, and once carved it left awkward quantities of meat behind — hence a recipe specifically for the remains. The label à la Tartare, generally traced to the French kitchen's habit of naming anything sharp or barbaric-tasting after the Tartars, was applied loosely in English cookery to crumbed grilled meat with a hot sauce; the cold mayonnaise version we now call tartare sauce belongs to the same family of names but a different technique. The Bovril is the giveaway on date: the beef extract was a late-Victorian commercial product, and its appearance in a household dictionary alongside Worcester sauce and anchovy essence shows how quickly bottled and jarred flavourings had become standard shortcuts in the domestic kitchen.