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Pork, Belly Of
The belly of pork is generally either pickled and boiled, or salted and cured for bacon, and it may be dressed as follows. Take the belly of a porker, either fresh or salted, lay it, skin downwards, flat on the table, and sprinkle over the inside a savoury powder made of two table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, two table-spoonfuls of powdered sage, a tea-spoonful of pepper, and two finely-minced shallots. Roll the meat tightly round, bind it with tape, and either bake it or roast it. It may be served hot with brown gravy, or allowed to grow cold, and then be pressed. Time to roast or bake, twenty minutes per pound. Probable cost, 9d. to 10d. per pound.
A rolled, stuffed pork belly of the sort that became the modern porchetta-style roast. The recipe is sound, but its timing belongs to an age when belly was expected to be firm rather than meltingly tender.
- The hinge: cook it longer and lowerTwenty minutes per pound gets a belly to done but not to good — the fat and connective tissue need hours to render. Roast a rolled belly at 300-325F for around 3 hours for a 4 lb piece, aiming for 190-195F in the centre, then raise the heat to 450F for 20-30 minutes at the end for the skin.
- "Bake it or roast it"In Victorian kitchens roasting generally meant cooking before an open fire and baking in a closed oven, though by this date the two words were often used interchangeably. For a domestic cook today they are the same operation. The original gives no oven setting, since ranges were not calibrated; for this cut, err well below a modern moderate oven.
- Buying the cutAsk for a whole boneless belly with the skin on, about 3-5 lb, rib bones and cartilage removed. A "porker" here simply means a young pig raised for fresh meat rather than an old bacon hog.
- If you use salted bellyCured or pickled belly from a butcher will be far saltier than anything the recipe assumes. Soak it overnight in cold water, changing the water once, and add no further salt to the stuffing.
- Two tablespoons of powdered sageThat is a heavy hand by modern taste. One tablespoon of dried rubbed sage, or a small handful of chopped fresh leaves, suits most palates; the crumbs are there to carry it and to absorb fat.
- BindingCotton tape has been replaced by butcher's twine — tie at 1-inch intervals so the roll holds its shape as the fat renders. Score the skin before tying and dry it uncovered in the fridge overnight if you want it to crisp.
- Pressing the cold rollTo "press" means wrapping the cooked roll tightly, laying it on a tray with a board and weights on top, and chilling it overnight. It slices cleanly into a cold cut, and this is the better use of leftovers than reheating.
- Yield and the priceA 4 lb belly rolled this way serves six to eight hot, more as a pressed cold meat. The 9d. to 10d. per pound is pre-decimal British currency, and marks belly as an inexpensive cut at the time — it is no longer that.
Belly was for centuries a cut you preserved rather than served: pickled in brine, or salted and smoked into the streaky bacon that underpinned British cooking. Cassell's opens the entry by saying exactly that, then offers the roll as an alternative, for meat either fresh or salted. The stuffing — shallot, pepper — is a close relation of the standard British sage-and-onion mixture that also went into goose and duck, sage being the herb traditionally paired with pork in English kitchens, a pairing often explained on the grounds that it cut the richness. Rolling and tying a flat cut around seasoning is very old and very widespread; the same logic produces Italian porchetta and French ventrèche roulée. The instruction to press the cold roll under weights points to a household economy in which one roast supplied a hot dinner and then a week of sliced cold meat for suppers and luncheons, a pattern that shaped a great deal of Victorian meat cookery.