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Pork, Leg of, Boiled
A leg of pork which is to be boiled should be previously salted. When purchasing it, choose a small compact leg not too fat. If already salted, wash it before beginning to cook it. If not, put it into a perfectly clean dry earthen pan, rub it well in every part with common salt, and repeat this operation every day for ten days, turning the meat each time, so that the brine may reach each part equally. When the pork is wanted, saw off the shankbone, wash it well, put the joint in a saucepan, cover with cold water, and bring the liquid slowly to a boil. Skim carefully, and simmer gently until the meat is done enough. If it is allowed to boil quickly the knuckle end will be sufficiently cooked before the heat has penetrated to the middle of the thick part of the leg. Carrots, turnips, parsnips, and peas pudding are the usual accompaniments of boiled leg of pork. If liked, the vegetables can be boiled with the meat, but they must not be put in until the water boils. The appearance of the dish will be improved if the skin is scored into small squares or diamonds, and each alternate square taken out. Time, a leg of pork weighing six pounds will require two hours' gentle simmering. Probable cost, 10 1/2d. to 1s. per pound. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
The cooking method here is sound nineteenth-century practice, but the ten-day dry-salting that precedes it is a home cure with no measured salt, no measured temperature and no stated storage conditions. That is the part that cannot be reproduced as printed.
- The cure is unquantified"Rub it well in every part with common salt" gives no weight of salt relative to the weight of the meat, which is one of the main things that determines whether a cure works. A six-pound leg is thick enough that salt penetration to the centre is slow, and surface rubbing alone leaves the deep muscle unprotected for days.
- No temperature is givenThe pan of salted pork is simply left standing and turned daily. A Victorian larder ran cold; a modern kitchen does not. Curing meat needs a controlled chill, and ten days of ambient-temperature holding of a large raw joint is a spoilage and pathogen risk regardless of how thoroughly it is later boiled.
- Dry salt alone is not a modern cureCommercial and tested home cures for pork use measured curing salt containing nitrite, which is what controls Clostridium botulinum in the anaerobic interior of a large joint. Plain table salt at an unspecified rate does not do that job. If you want to cure pork at home, follow a current recipe with weights and temperatures.
- Why the gentle simmer matteredThe warning against a fast boil is the soundest line in the entry. A thick leg cooked at a rolling boil overcooks the thin knuckle end long before the centre is heated through, which is a matter of physics rather than fashion and still holds for any large joint.
- Vocabulary"Peas pudding" is dried split peas boiled in a cloth to a firm puree, the standard partner to boiled pork and pease-and-bacon dishes. "Saw off the shankbone" was a butcher's task then as now; ask for it. The earthen pan would have been a glazed earthenware crock.
- The prices10 1/2d. to 1s. a pound is late-Victorian money, a shilling at the top end. It is useful only as a relative signal within the book's own costings.
- YieldThe original claims eight to ten servings from six pounds bone-in, which is consistent with a boiled joint served with root vegetables and a starchy pudding rather than as the sole substance of the meal.
Boiled salt pork with peas pudding and root vegetables is a long-standing fixture of the British table, and it survives in Cassell's not as a delicacy but as a working household dinner. Before refrigeration, salting was how a pig became food that kept, and a leg was often cured rather than eaten fresh; the entry's assumption that the cook will either buy the joint already salted or salt it herself over ten days reflects a kitchen where preservation was a routine domestic chore rather than something bought in. The scoring of the skin into diamonds with alternate squares lifted out is in keeping with late-Victorian presentation. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for a broad middle-class readership around the end of the nineteenth century, characteristically gives cost per pound and number of persons served, which suggests the book was addressed to someone budgeting a household as much as cooking for one.