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PORK, GRISKIN OF (as dressed in the South of Europe)
In Spain and Italy the griskin of pork is allowed to lie in claret flavoured with garlic for five or six days before it is dressed, being hung up to dry at intervals. At the end of that time it is roasted, and served with tomato sauce; or, sweet herbs being sprinkled over it, it is wrapped in bay-leaves, and stewed gently in the wine in which it was soaked, to which a slight flavouring of Seville orange-juice has been added. It forms a peculiar and piquant dish, much liked by those who have acquired a taste for preparations of the kind.
The method is a five- or six-day ambient marinade of raw pork, which is why this one belongs on the page as reading rather than as dinner. The notes below explain the vocabulary and the specific reason the process fails a modern kitchen.
- Why it fails: unrefrigerated raw pork for five to six daysWine at roughly 12% alcohol and pH around 3.4 does not preserve meat; it only flavours it. Held anywhere near room temperature for that long, a griskin supports growth of Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus, the last of which produces a heat-stable toxin that later roasting will not destroy.
- Why it fails: "hung up to dry at intervals"The pork is repeatedly air-dried and returned to the wine, but with no salt, no nitrite, no measured weight loss and no stated temperature or humidity. Air-drying whole raw pork without those controls leaves surface spoilage and pathogen growth to chance rather than design. Use a current, tested cured-pork recipe if that is the dish you want.
- Why it fails: the soaking wine becomes the sauceIn the second variation the pork is stewed in the liquid it sat in for nearly a week. Even long simmering does not deal with staphylococcal enterotoxin, and the marinade has by then been a nutrient broth at ambient temperature for days.
- GriskinThe lean strip left along the chine and loin end once the fat had been stripped for lard — closest today to a boned loin end or pork neck. It was regarded as a cheap cut.
- ClaretIn English usage of the period, red Bordeaux, and by extension any dry red table wine. The setting given is Spanish and Italian, though the term used is the English one.
- Seville orange-juiceThe bitter marmalade orange, sharp and slightly resinous rather than sweet, in season roughly January to February. Where a modern recipe wants that note, bitter orange or a mix of orange and lemon juice is the usual stand-in.
- Sweet herbsThe period's catch-all for parsley, thyme, marjoram and savory, sometimes with basil. Not a fixed formula; the cook used what the garden held.
Cassell's presents this as a curiosity of foreign practice rather than a household standby, and the closing line — "much liked by those who have acquired a taste for preparations of the kind" — reads as a caution to English readers that they may not share the taste. Long wine steeps of this sort are associated with Mediterranean and Iberian preparations in which wine, garlic and herbs may have been thought to extend the life of meat as well as flavour it, though how widely that assumption was held is not documented here. The griskin itself is a reminder of how carcasses were once broken down: it is what remained of the loin after the fat had been taken for lard, a lean cut that a cook might think worth marinating. Whether Spanish and Italian households actually treated it this way, or whether the account reached Cassell's second-hand through travellers' reports, the book does not say.