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Pork, Chine of, Roasted
Score the chine lengthwise, brush the skin over with salad oil, and put the meat down to a clear fire, a considerable distance from it at first, that it may heat gently through before it browns. Baste liberally. Send good brown gravy, apple sauce, tomato sauce, or piquant sauce, to table with it. If liked, a table-spoonful of powdered sage may be sprinkled over the meat a quarter of an hour before it is taken from the fire. When this is done, care should be taken that the gravy is poured round, and not upon, the meat. Time to roast, twenty minutes to the pound. Probable cost, 9 1/2d. to 10 1/2d. per pound.
This is spit-roasting instructions written for an open fire, so the useful work is translating the fire management into oven terms and finding a joint that resembles a chine.
- What a chine isThe chine is the backbone with the meat attached along it, cut as a long joint. Butchers today rarely break a pig this way; a bone-in pork loin rack, or a bone-in loin end roast of 4-6 lb, behaves the same way under heat.
- Salad oilNineteenth-century "salad oil" usually meant olive oil, though other refined oils were sold under the name. Any neutral oil or olive oil does the job here, which is simply to help the rind blister.
- The distance from the fireStarting the joint well back from the flames and moving it closer is the whole technique: gentle heat through the middle, browning only at the end. In an oven, roast at 325F until the centre is nearly done, then raise to 450F for the last 20-30 minutes to crisp the rind.
- Scoring, and the hinge of the dishScore the rind lengthwise through the skin and fat but not into the meat, and keep the skin dry before oiling. Wet rind steams instead of crackling, and no amount of high heat at the end recovers it.
- Time and temperatureTwenty minutes to the pound at open-fire heat is roughly right for a 325F oven, but cook to an internal reading rather than the clock: 145F at the thickest point, away from bone, then rest 15 minutes. A 5 lb joint takes about an hour and three-quarters.
- Basting"Baste liberally" applied to meat turning on a spit and losing fat to the pan. In an oven, baste the meat but keep basting liquid off the scored rind, which needs to stay dry.
- The sageA tablespoon of powdered sage over the joint a quarter-hour before it comes off the heat is a finishing seasoning, not a rub. Powdered sage is dried sage ground fine, and added earlier it is liable to scorch.
- Gravy poured round, not uponThe direction follows the sage: "when this is done", gravy poured over the joint would wash the sprinkled sage off. It will also soften the rind.
- The cost line9 1/2d. to 10 1/2d. per pound is pre-decimal British currency, twelve pence to the shilling.
Cassell's belonged to the era when a roast still meant meat turned in front of a fire, with the oven treated as a second-best substitute, and the careful instruction to keep the joint "a considerable distance" away at first is fire management that an oven dial has since made invisible. The chine itself is a reminder of how differently pigs were once cut up: whole-carcass butchery in a domestic or village setting produced joints like the chine that supermarket boning has quietly abolished. Sage with pork is an old English pairing, and the recipe offers apple sauce, tomato sauce or a piquant sauce as alternatives.