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Pig, Sucking, Stuffing of Chestnuts For
Peel, scald, and blanch fifty chestnuts, and boil them in a pint of milk, with a pinch of salt and half an ounce of butter. When they are done enough, drain and dry them, and mix them with one pound of good pork sausage meat. Fill the body of the pig, and sew it securely. When the pig is filled with this forcemeat, a sauce, made as follows, should be sent to table with it. Peel, scald, and blanch six ounces of sound chestnuts, and stew them in three-quarters of a pint of good brown gravy until they are sufficiently tender to be rubbed through a hair sieve. Stir into the pulp half a dozen table-spoonfuls of rich brown sauce, season rather highly with mace and cayenne, and add a little salt, if necessary. Stir the sauce over the fire until it boils, and serve immediately. A glassful of Madeira or sherry may be added or not. Time, twenty minutes to boil the chestnuts for the stuffing; one hour and a quarter for the sauce. Probable cost, 1s. 6d. Sufficient for one pig.
Two preparations in one entry: a chestnut-and-sausage forcemeat for the cavity of a suckling pig, and a chestnut brown sauce to go with it. Both are workable today, with a few translations.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to the clockRaw pork sausage meat packed into a body cavity is the slowest-heating part of the roast. Take the stuffing itself to 165F on a probe, at the thickest point, before you judge the pig done; the meat around it will be well past safe by then.
- Fifty chestnutsAn unhelpfully variable measure. Fifty average chestnuts in the shell is roughly 1 lb 6 oz to 1 lb 8 oz, giving about 1 lb peeled. Buy 1 1/2 lb fresh in the shell, or use 14-16 oz of vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts and skip the peeling and blanching.
- "Peel, scald, and blanch"Three steps, not one: slit and remove the hard outer shell, drop the nuts into boiling water for a minute or two, then rub off the bitter inner skin while still hot. Vacuum-packed chestnuts have had all of this done.
- Brown gravy and rich brown sauceTwo related things: a well-reduced brown meat stock, and a thicker, more concentrated brown sauce of the espagnole type. A well-reduced veal or beef stock, lightly thickened, will stand in for the gravy; the six tablespoons of 'rich brown sauce' can be a more concentrated reduction of the same.
- Hair sieveA sieve of horsehair mesh, generally reckoned preferable to metal for delicate purees because it would not taint or discolour them. A fine stainless sieve is the equivalent; a food processor followed by a sieve is faster.
- Mace and cayenne"Season rather highly" was written for palates used to more mace than ours. Start at 1/4 teaspoon ground mace and a pinch of cayenne for the quantity of sauce here, and taste up from there.
- The timingsTwenty minutes for the stuffing chestnuts is right for fresh nuts simmered in milk. The "one hour and a quarter" for the sauce covers the stewing of the chestnuts in gravy until they collapse -- allow that long if using fresh nuts, considerably less with pre-cooked ones.
- Yield and the pig itself'Sufficient for one pig' is the entry's only guide to quantity; no weight is given. A suckling pig as sold today usually runs somewhere between about 10 and 20 lb, so scale the forcemeat accordingly. Suckling pigs are a special order from a butcher. The same forcemeat and sauce work with a large pork loin roast or a boned shoulder.
- Probable cost1s. 6d. can only be the cost of the stuffing and sauce; it would not have bought the pig itself.
Roast suckling pig was a set piece of the English festive table long before the Victorians. Chestnuts were a common partner for rich meats, imported from Italy and Spain in quantity by the later nineteenth century. The chestnut appears twice here, once in the stuffing and once pureed into the sauce. The optional glass of Madeira or sherry at the end is the older English habit of finishing a brown sauce with fortified wine, a practice that survives chiefly in the deglazing of pan juices.