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PIG, SUCKING (en Blanquette)
Cut the remains of a cold roast pig into neat pieces, freed entirely from skin and gristle, and season with pepper, salt, and grated nutmeg. Melt one ounce of butter in a stewpan, and mix with it half an ounce of flour. Add half a dozen mushrooms cut into slices, and a bunch of parsley, and moisten the whole with half a pint of stock and a glassful of sherry. Simmer the sauce gently until it is considerably reduced, and of the consistency of thick cream, then strain it, and put in the meat. When this is quite hot, without having boiled, stir into the sauce the yolks of three eggs beaten up with a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Stir this for a minute, and serve the meat on a hot dish with the sauce poured over it. Time, two hours. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A reheat dish rather than a cooked-from-raw one: cold roast pork is warmed through in a small velouté finished with an egg-and-lemon liaison. The whole thing takes about half an hour of actual work, whatever the stated time.
- The hinge: never let the yolks boilOnce the beaten yolks and lemon juice go in, the sauce must stay below a simmer. A minute of gentle stirring off direct heat thickens it; a bubble curdles it into scrambled threads that cannot be rescued.
- "Without having boiled"The meat is already cooked, so it only needs to come up to serving heat. Boiling reheated pork squeezes out its remaining moisture and turns neat pieces stringy.
- Imperial measuresHalf a pint of stock is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. A "glassful" of sherry means a wine glass of the period, roughly 2 fl oz; use a dry amontillado or fino rather than a sweet cream sherry.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Anything that holds a quart and heats evenly will do; a wide pan reduces the sauce faster.
- Bunch of parsleyWhole stalks tied together, not chopped leaves. They flavour the sauce and are discarded when it is strained, along with the mushroom slices.
- Straining loses the mushroomsAs written the mushrooms are sieved out with the parsley, having given their flavour to the sauce. Cooks who want them on the plate should set the slices aside after straining and return them with the meat.
- If you have no sucking pigFew households roast a whole suckling pig now. Leftover roast pork loin or shoulder works on the same terms: trim skin, fat and gristle away entirely, since the sauce is meant to stay pale and clean.
- "Time, two hours"The recipe does not say what the two hours covers; the sauce itself reduces to thick-cream consistency on a modern burner in 15 to 20 minutes.
- YieldFive or six servings, as the original states. The recipe gives no weight for the cold meat, only the sauce quantities.
Blanquette is simply the French word for a white stew — meat gently cooked or reheated in a pale sauce that is never allowed to brown, then bound at the last moment with egg yolk and something acid. Veal is the classic subject, but Cassell's applies the treatment here to what the book calls "the remains" of a roast, and that phrase is the real point of the entry. Victorian household cookery books devote whole runs of recipes to the second appearance of a joint, because a large roast was bought and cooked once and then had to be made presentable again for several days. A roast suckling pig, served whole with its crackling, was a set-piece dish for a party; the day after, the picked meat had lost the crackling that justified it, so it was reclothed in a sauce borrowed from the French repertoire. The egg-and-lemon liaison at the end is a genuine piece of classical technique, and the instruction that the meat must be hot "without having boiled" shows the compiler knew exactly where the dish could fail.