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Pork, Chine Of
The chine of pork is that part of the pig which is taken from the spine between the shoulders. It is generally sent to table with turkey, and should be salted for three or four days before it is cooked. There is a good deal more of fat than lean in it. To boil it, put it in plenty of water, let it boil slowly, skim thoroughly, and serve garnished with any kind of greens. It is as often roasted as boiled. When roasted, the skin should be scored before it is put down to the fire. Make a sauce by frying two or three sliced onions in butter until they are lightly browned. Pour off the oil, and add a cupful of good gravy with a tea-spoonful of mixed mustard, half a cupful of vinegar, a pinch of salt, and a large lump of sugar. Boil this, and pour into the dish. Time to boil, half an hour to the pound after it reaches boiling-point; to roast, twenty minutes to the pound. Probable cost, 10d. per pound. Sufficient, four or five pounds for a moderate-sized turkey.
A Victorian festive joint written for a cook who could order any cut by name and had a cold larder to hang it in. Two things need translating: what the butcher should actually hand you, and the cooking times, which are long by any modern reckoning.
- What the chine isThe chine is the section of backbone with the meat either side of it, taken from between the shoulders u2014 the neck end of the loin, bone in. No supermarket sells it under that name. Ask a butcher for a bone-in pork neck end or blade-end loin rack, roughly 4\"5 lb as the recipe specifies.
- The saltingThree or four days in salt here is for flavour and firmness, not preservation, and the original assumes a larder at cellar temperature. Do it in the refrigerator, in a covered dish, and rinse and dry the joint before cooking. Anything longer, or done at room temperature, is a curing project needing measured cure and temperature.
- Roasting time and temperatureTwenty minutes to the pound in front of an open fire is not twenty minutes to the pound in an oven. Roast at 425F for the first 20 minutes to set the scored skin, drop to 350F, and go by a thermometer: 145F at the centre with a 10-minute rest for the loin meat, though a fatty bone-in joint is often taken to 160F for texture.
- Boiling timeHalf an hour to the pound gives two and a half hours on a 5 lb joint. That was the usual direction for salted pork and it does produce very soft meat, but a gentle simmer to an internal 160F is plenty. Keep it barely trembling; a hard boil tightens the lean and leaves it stringy.
- Scoring the skinScore through the skin and into the fat but not to the meat, at quarter-inch intervals. Dry skin is the hinge for crackling u2014 pat the joint completely dry after its salting and leave it uncovered in the fridge overnight if you can.
- The sauce, in measurementsA cupful was not a standardised measure in Victorian British cookery; treat it as roughly 8 to 10 fl oz. "Good gravy" means well-reduced meat stock, not thickened pan gravy. "Mixed mustard" is mustard powder already made up with water -- prepared English mustard. A "large lump of sugar" is a lump cut from a sugar-loaf, probably 1 to 2 teaspoons; start at one and taste, since half a cup of vinegar is a sharp base.
- Pouring off the oilAfter frying the onions, tip off the butter before adding the liquids. Skipping this leaves the sauce greasy.
- YieldA 4\"5 lb chine serves eight to ten as a side dish alongside a turkey, or six on its own with greens.
The chine belongs to the English Christmas table rather than the everyday one, which is why Cassell's frames it as an accompaniment to turkey rather than a roast in its own right. The word comes through Old French eschine, the backbone, and the cut kept its name long after most other pork joints were renamed for the shop counter. Salting the chine before cooking is what the source calls for, a habit often traced to the days when the autumn pig was salted down whole and fresh pork was a seasonal luxury; Lincolnshire kept a related tradition of stuffed chine, packed with parsley and served cold at Whitsun and Christmas, which survives locally. The costing of 10d. per pound places this in the late Victorian retail market, and the assumption that a household would buy four or five pounds of pork simply to sit beside the turkey says a good deal about the scale of a middle-class festive dinner.