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PIG'S FRY (another way)
Procure a fresh pig's fry. Wash it well, and dry it, then cut it into slices the third of an inch in thickness. Butter a baking-dish, cover the bottom with a layer of the lean slices, and sprinkle over them a little powdered sage, minced onion, pepper, and salt. Place sliced potatoes on these, and then a layer of fat slices, with a little more seasoning, and sliced potatoes over the whole. Fill the dish with boiling stock or water, mixed smoothly with a small portion of flour, and bake in a moderate oven. Serve very hot. Time to bake, two hours and a half. Probable cost, 8d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian offal bake that assumes you can buy a whole pig's fry from your butcher. The parts vary, and that variation is the thing to sort out before anything else.
- What "pig's fry" isThe assorted pluck of a freshly killed pig: liver, heart, lights (lungs), sometimes a piece of sweetbread and a sheet of caul fat. There is no single modern equivalent, so order what you can get — pig's liver and heart are the usual survivors — and treat the "lean slices" as liver and heart, the "fat slices" as any caul or belly fat included.
- LungsIn the United States, lungs may not legally be sold for human food, so authentic lights are unobtainable there. British and continental butchers will sometimes still supply them to order.
- The hinge: liver and long bakingTwo and a half hours will render pig's liver grainy and dry. The recipe does layer the lean slices under potatoes and fill the dish with liquid, which goes some way to protecting them, though it gives no reason. It also does not say to cover the dish; keeping it covered with the liquid at the level of the top potato layer, or slicing the liver thicker than a third of an inch, will help it hold together.
- Moderate oven350F / 175C. At that heat the potatoes and the seasoned liquid will thicken into a gravy rather than boiling dry.
- The thickened liquid"Boiling stock or water, mixed smoothly with a small portion of flour" means roughly a tablespoon of flour slaked with cold liquid per pint before the hot stock goes in. Add it hot or the flour will sit in lumps under the potatoes.
- Sage and onionPowdered sage is much stronger by volume than chopped fresh; a scant teaspoon total is plenty for a dish this size. The sage-and-onion pairing here is doing the same job it does in pork stuffing, cutting the richness of the fat.
- Vessel and yieldA buttered baking-dish of about 2 quarts, ideally with a lid or foil for the first two hours and uncovered for the last half hour to brown the top potatoes. Serves three or four, as stated, with bread.
- The price"8d. per pound" is eightpence, a marker of how cheap pluck was relative to butcher's cuts. It is a period cost note, not a quantity — reckon on about 1 to 1.5 lb of fry.
Pig's fry belonged to the killing of the household or village pig, when the internal organs had to be eaten within a day or two while the carcass went to salt and smoke. Because it was perishable and cheap, it appears throughout nineteenth-century cookery books as an economy dish, and Cassell's — which routinely printed a "probable cost" for each receipt — gives it here as one of several ways to use the same set of parts. The layered version with potatoes and a floured gravy is essentially a hotpot method applied to offal, and closely related to the fry-and-caul dishes still cooked in parts of the English Midlands and the West Country. The word "fry" here means the collection of parts, not the cooking method; the name is generally traced to the older practice of frying the pluck in the pig's own fat straight after slaughter.