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
Pig, Sucking, Roast
Wipe the pig thoroughly, stuff it, and sew up the slit securely with soft thread. Truss it like a hare, with the fore-legs skewered back and the hind-legs drawn forward. Rub it over with clarified butter, or fresh salad-oil, and put it down, not too near, before a clear brisk fire. Baste constantly, or the crackling will be blistered and burnt, instead of crisp and brown. As the middle part requires less roasting than the ends, it is usual, when the pig is half done, to hang a flat iron from the spit in such a position that it will shade the middle from the heat of the fire. It is well to tie some butter in a piece of muslin, and rub the pig over with this two or three times whilst it is roasting. When it is done enough, cut off the head before the pig is taken from the fire, take out the brains, and chop them up quickly with the stuffing; add the gravy which has dropped from the pig, and, when it can be obtained, a cupful of good veal or beef gravy, together with a little cayenne, lemon-juice, and grated nutmeg. To dish it, cut the pig open, and lay the sides back to back, lengthwise, upon the dish, with one half of the head at each end and the ears at the sides. If preferred, the brains may be stirred into melted butter instead of gravy. Rich brown sauce, tomato, poivrade, piquant, provencale, bread, apple, and the old-fashioned currant sauce, are all served with sucking pig. Time to roast, according to size: a three weeks old pig, two hours. Probable cost, 6s. to 12s. Sufficient, a three weeks old pig for eight or nine persons.
This is spit-roasting instructions written for an open hearth, and most of its detail is about managing radiant heat from one side. Translating it to an oven is mostly a matter of shielding, basting and knowing when to stop.
- The hinge: dry skin, constant fatCrackling depends on skin that is bone-dry before it meets heat and kept wetted with fat, not water, during cooking. The original's warning about blistering is real: uneven, unbasted skin bubbles and scorches instead of crisping evenly.
- Fire to oven"Not too near, before a clear brisk fire" is fierce one-sided radiant heat. The book gives no oven temperatures; one workable modern conversion is a hot start of around 450F for 20-30 minutes to set the skin, then 325-350F for the remainder, with a final blast back at 450F to finish the crackling.
- The flat ironThe iron hung from the spit shaded the thin loin while the shoulders and hams caught up. Aluminium foil over the back and belly does the same job; remove it for the last stage so the skin colours.
- Timing and sizeThe book gives an age, not a weight; a three-week pig would have been small, perhaps somewhere in the region of 10-14 lb dressed. Two hours is plausible at that size, but judge by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part of the shoulder rather than the clock; the pig is done at 160-165F, and the shoulders will lag the loin.
- The brainsThe warning at the head of this page concerns cattle. Pig is not a BSE species, but supermarket butchers rarely supply brains, and the sauce as written folds cooked brain into stuffing and gravy without a further cooking step. The dish works perfectly well with the pan gravy, stuffing, cayenne, lemon and nutmeg alone.
- "Truss it like a hare"Forelegs skewered back along the body, hind legs drawn forward under the belly, so the animal crouches rather than sprawls. Cassell's assumed you knew the hare; the point is a compact shape that fits a spit or a tray and cooks evenly.
- StuffingNo stuffing is specified in this entry; the book handles stuffings elsewhere. A common Victorian stuffing for sucking pig was breadcrumbs with sage, onion, butter and seasoning; anything wet or dense will slow the roast and steam the belly from within.
- Cost and yieldSix to twelve shillings was a substantial outlay for a single dish in the 1870s, which is why this is a celebration roast. Eight or nine servings holds true for a pig of that size, though a whole one is more often carved for a dozen at a buffet now.
- ServingSplitting the carcass and laying the halves back to back with a half-head at each end is a Victorian presentation. It is optional; carving into shoulder, loin and leg at the table, with sheets of crackling broken over the top, loses nothing but the theatre.
Sucking pig — a pig taken while still on the sow, generally at three to six weeks — is one of the oldest festival roasts in Europe, common on Roman tables and a fixture of English Christmas and Twelfth Night feasting long before Cassell's set it down in the 1870s. Its appeal was practical as much as ceremonial: an unweaned animal has thin, gelatinous skin that crisps into crackling in a way an older pig's will not, and it is small enough to roast whole on a domestic spit. The tail of sauces listed here is a snapshot of a kitchen in transition, with French additions like poivrade and provencale sitting alongside the English bread and apple sauces, and currant sauce already flagged as "old-fashioned" — a sweet-sharp relic of the medieval taste for fruit with roast meat that was on its way out by the end of the century. The instruction to shade the middle of the pig with a hanging flat iron is the sort of detail that only survives in books written while open-hearth roasting was still living practice.