Important: Safety Warning
This recipe calls for animal brains or related nervous-system tissue. Cattle brain and spinal tissue can transmit bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), the cause of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, which is fatal and has no treatment.
This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.
Home › The Principles of Cookery › PIG, SUCKING, ROAST (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
PIG, SUCKING, ROAST (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
A sucking pig is in prime order for the spit when about three weeks old. It loses part of its goodness every hour after it is killed; if not quite fresh, no art can make the crackling crisp. To be in perfection, it should be killed in the morning to be eaten at dinner; it requires very careful roasting. For the stuffing, take of the crumb of a stale loaf about five ounces; rub it through a colander; mince finely a handful of sage (i.e. about two ounces), and a large onion (about an ounce and a half); mix these together with an egg, some pepper and salt, and a bit of butter as big as an egg; fill the belly of the pig with this, and sew it up; lay it to the fire, and baste it with salad-oil till it is quite done. Do not leave it a moment; it requires the most vigilant attendance. Roast it at a clear brisk fire at some distance. To gain the praise of epicurean pig-eaters, the crackling must be nicely crisped and delicately and lightly browned, without being either blistered or burnt. A small three weeks old pig will be done enough in about an hour and a half. Before you take it from the fire, cut off the head, and part that and the body down the middle; chop the brains very fine with some boiled sage-leaves, and mix them with good veal gravy, or beef gravy, or what runs from the pig when you cut its head off. Send up a tureenful of beef gravy sauce besides. Currant sauce is still a favourite with some of the old school. Lay your pig back to back in the dish, with one half of the head on each side, and the ears one at each end, which you must take care to make nice and crisp. When you cut off the pettitoes, leave the skin long, round the ends of the legs. When you first lay the pig before the fire, rub it all over with fresh butter or salad-oil; ten minutes after, when the skin looks dry, dredge it well with flour all over; let it remain on an hour; then rub it with a soft cloth. A pig is a very troublesome subject to roast. Most persons have them baked.
Dr. Kitchener's directions are written for an open hearth and a turning spit, and the finishing sauce is built from the animal's brain. The roast itself belongs to a living tradition, but this version cannot be followed as printed.
- The brain sauce is the reason to stopThe head is split and the brains chopped and stirred into hot gravy, with no separate cooking step and no way to confirm the tissue reached a safe temperature. Brain and spinal tissue is also the hardest part of a carcass to handle cleanly, and pig brain in particular is associated with Streptococcus suis infection in people who prepare it. Leave the sauce alone; if you want a roast suckling pig, use a current recipe.
- About the printed warningThe BSE warning attached to this page concerns cattle brain and spinal cord; pigs are not known to carry a naturally occurring transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. The caution against eating the brains still stands, but for the bacterial and handling reasons above rather than for prion disease.
- Doneness was guesswork"About an hour and a half" before a hearth fire is a description of one particular fireplace, not a cooking time. A whole young pig has thin loin and thick shoulder and hams, and the period method offers no test of doneness at all beyond the look of the skin.
- Salad-oilIn nineteenth-century English usage this generally means olive oil, more often bought for dressing salads than for cooking. Here it is used purely as a basting medium to dry and crisp the rind.
- PettitoesThe pig's feet, which this recipe has you cut off; the skin is to be left long round the ends of the legs.
- A handful of sage is two ouncesKitchiner gives his own conversion, and two ounces of sage against five ounces of breadcrumb is a violently strong stuffing by modern taste.
- Currant sauceA sweet-sharp sauce of dried or red currants cooked with wine and sometimes breadcrumb, served with pork, venison and game. Kitchiner's own text, quoted here, already calls it a taste of 'the old school.'
William Kitchiner (1775-1827), who held a medical degree but is better known as a London writer and experimenter than as a practising physician, published Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook's Oracle in 1817, and was one of the earliest English writers to test recipes methodically and to write about cooking as a matter of attention rather than lavishness; later compilers such as Cassell's quoted him freely for decades after his death. His voice is unmistakable here: the insistence that the pig be killed the same morning, the warning not to leave the fire for a moment, the dry closing admission that most people have the thing baked. Roast sucking pig was a set-piece of English festive cookery from the medieval period onward, and Kitchiner's whole procedure - oil, then a flour dredge left to set for an hour, then a rub with a soft cloth - is a technique for drying the rind so it crisps evenly. The dish faded from English tables in the twentieth century, though it survives strongly in Spain, Portugal, the Philippines and much of Latin America.