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Pork, Leg of, Roasted
A leg of pork of eight pounds will require about three hours. Score the skin across in narrow strips--some score it in diamonds--about a quarter of an inch apart Stuff the knuckle with sage and onion minced fine, and a little grated bread, seasoned with pepper, salt, and the yolk of an egg. Do not put the meat too near the fire; rub a little sweet-oil on the skin with a paste-brush or a goose feather; this makes the crackling crisper and browner than basting it with dripping, and it will be a better colour than all the art of cookery can make it in any other way. And this is the best way to prevent the skin from blistering, which is principally occasioned by the joint being placed too near the fire.
This is open-hearth instruction — the meat stands in front of the fire, not in a box — so the useful part is the technique for crackling rather than the timing. A bone-in fresh leg of pork behaves much the same in an oven, with a few adjustments.
- The hinge: oil, not drippingRubbing the scored skin with oil rather than basting it with fat is the whole point of the recipe, and it still holds. Fat and meat juices soften rind; a thin film of oil and salt dries it and lets it blister into crackling. Do not baste the skin with pan juices at any stage.
- "Sweet-oil"Plain olive oil, the mild refined sort sold in Victorian grocers as a table and medicinal oil. Any neutral oil does the same job. The goose feather is a soft brush; a pastry brush or your hand is the equivalent.
- Which cutA leg of pork here means an uncured fresh ham, bone-in, skin on — not a gammon or a boned loin. Butchers will usually need notice, and an 8 lb piece is likely to be a half leg. Ask for the rind left on and scored, or score it yourself with a craft knife at quarter-inch intervals, through skin and just into the fat, not into the meat.
- Oven equivalentStart at 450F for 25-30 minutes to set the crackling, then drop to 325F for the remainder. The original three hours for 8 lb is about right as a total, but cook to temperature: 145F at the thickest part away from the bone, then rest 20-30 minutes. A large leg often takes 3 to 3.5 hours.
- "Do not put the meat too near the fire"The blistering the author warns about is scorching from radiant heat. In an oven the equivalent fault is a rack set high under the top element; keep the joint in the middle of the oven and cover the skin loosely with foil if it colours too fast before the centre is done.
- The knuckle stuffingSage, finely minced onion, grated fresh breadcrumbs, pepper, salt and an egg yolk to bind — roughly a cup of crumbs, a small onion and a good tablespoon of sage for this size. Packed into the cavity at the knuckle end. The yolk goes in raw, so check the stuffing itself is piping hot through before serving rather than assuming it has kept pace with the joint.
- YieldAn 8 lb bone-in leg serves 10 to 12, with cold meat afterwards. It carves best if the crackling is lifted off in one sheet before slicing and broken up separately.
It reads like advice from the era when a leg of pork was a set-piece for a large household — hung on a spit or a bottle-jack before the fire and turned steadily, with the distance from the coals watched. The sage-and-onion stuffing pushed into the knuckle is the same seasoning England had long attached to pork and goose, sage being traditionally credited with cutting the richness of fatty meat. The fussing over crackling is the giveaway: cookery writers argued about oil versus dripping and about scoring in strips or diamonds, because blistered, leathery rind was the standard failure of hearth roasting and no oven thermostat existed to prevent it. The wording here, down to the paste-brush and the goose feather, is of a kind that was copied and re-copied between cookery books rather than freshly composed, and the underlying observation happens to be correct.