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Pig, Sucking, Gravy For
Due regard should be had for the kind of stuffing used. If of the ordinary sage-and-onion type, bread, or apple, or brown sauce may be used. With chestnut stuffing, chestnut sauce is most suitable. A gravy made by pouring some stock into the pan and boiling it up with the gravy from the pig is generally liked. A little lemon-juice should be put in the gravy to counteract the richness of the dish.
This is a pan gravy in outline rather than measured form, which is how most Victorian gravy directions read. The workable instruction is the last one: acid to cut the fat.
- The hingeLemon juice is not a garnish here. Roast suckling pig throws an enormous amount of fat, and a squeeze of acid stirred into the finished gravy is what keeps it from coating the palate. Add it off the heat, taste, and add more if the gravy still reads greasy.
- Skim before you boilDeglazing a suckling-pig pan without skimming gives you a gravy that is largely rendered fat. Pour the pan contents into a jug, let it settle a minute, and spoon off the top layer before returning the dark juices to the pan with the stock.
- QuantitiesNone are given. As a starting point, roughly 500 ml of light pork or chicken stock deglazed into the roasting pan, reduced by about a third and finished with the juice of half a lemon; adjust to the size of the pig.
- "Brown sauce"In Victorian cookery this generally meant a stock-based sauce thickened with a brown roux, not the bottled condiment sold under that name in Britain today.
- Chestnut saucePeriod versions cook chestnuts soft in stock and sieve them, sometimes with cream added. The result is thick and mildly sweet, closer to a puree than a thin pouring gravy.
- Apple and bread saucesBoth are sweet or bland foils rather than gravies. The entry lists them as alternatives to one another and separately notes that a pan gravy is 'generally liked'; if you want sauce and gravy together, keep the gravy thin and unthickened.
- Thickening, if you want itThe original says nothing about thickening, which suits a fatty roast. A teaspoon of flour whisked into the pan fat before the stock goes in is one period alternative, though it may mute the lemon.
Roast suckling pig was a set-piece dish of the English gentry table and survived into late-Victorian household books like Cassell's mainly as an occasion roast, for Christmas or a large party. The stuffing choices listed here map the whole range of nineteenth-century pork accompaniments: sage and onion, the standard English pork stuffing; chestnut; and apple. That final instruction is the most telling line in the entry. Whole young pig is very rich, and cookery writers of the period returned repeatedly to acid, whether lemon, verjuice, vinegar or fruit, as the corrective for fat. Suckling pig is still eaten widely in Spain, Portugal, the Philippines and southern China; in Britain it largely fell out of fashion during the twentieth century.