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Pork, Minced
Take a pound of cold roast pork, free from fat or skin, and season it with a little pepper, salt, and dry mustard. Pare, core, and mince finely four large apples, and put them into a saucepan with two ounces of fresh butter and three chopped onions of a moderate size. Stir these ingredients over the fire until tender. Pour over them three table-spoonfuls of nicely-flavoured stock, or, if any is at hand, of the gravy that was served with the roast pork. Add a table-spoonful of vinegar, and a piece of brown thickening the size of a small nut, or, if this is not to be had, a tea-spoonful of flour mixed smoothly with a dessert-spoonful of cold stock. Let the sauce boil five or six minutes. Stir into it the minced pork, and when this is quite hot, add the juice of a small lemon, and serve immediately. If the flavour is liked, a piece of garlic the size of a pea may be simmered with the sauce. Garnish the dish with toasted sippets. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A Victorian way of using up Sunday's roast pork, closer to a hash than a mince, with apple and onion doing the work of both sauce and vegetable. Two things decide whether it succeeds: how you cut the meat, and how briefly you heat it.
- Cut, do not processChop the cold pork by hand into small dice or shreds, roughly 1/4 inch. A food processor turns cooked pork to paste, and the dish depends on the meat keeping its texture against the soft apple.
- Reheat, do not cook againThe pork is already cooked; it goes into the sauce only until hot through, a couple of minutes. Longer and lean roast pork turns dry and stringy. Bring it to a proper steaming heat, then take it off.
- Brown thickeningA browned roux: butter and flour cooked to a nut colour, then cooled and kept solid in a jar, a convenience some Victorian kitchens had ready. The alternative the recipe itself gives, a teaspoon of flour slaked in cold stock, is the simpler route today.
- Spoon measuresThese were not standardised, but a tablespoon here is roughly 15 ml, a dessert-spoonful about 2 teaspoons, and a teaspoon close to ours. Three tablespoons of stock is a very small amount by design; this is a moist mince, not a stew.
- The applesUse a variety that collapses, such as Bramley, Grenadier or a soft eating apple. Four large ones is around 1 1/2 lb before paring, which reduces to a thick puree; a firm supermarket Gala will stay in stubborn cubes.
- Acid balanceVinegar, then lemon juice at the end, is deliberate: the apples and butter are sweet and rich, and the sharpness is what keeps the dish from cloying. Add the lemon off the heat so it stays bright.
- Garlic"The size of a pea" is a fraction of a clove. Nineteenth-century English cookery treated garlic as a background note; a whole crushed clove will read as modern rather than wrong, but it will dominate.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted or fried bread, arranged round the edge of the dish. Cut them from a firm white loaf and add them at the table, or they soften into the sauce.
- YieldTwo or three, as stated, from a pound of meat. It suits a shallow hot dish with plain boiled potatoes or a spoonful of rice.
This belongs to the great age of English "re-made dishes" -- the recipes for the cold joint, which in a middle-class household was expected to reappear on the table more than once before it was finished. Minces, hashes and rissoles were the respectable answer, and such dishes were often dressed to look intentional rather than merely thrifty, hence the border of sippets and the final squeeze of lemon. The apple and onion base echoes the traditional English pairing of pork with apple sauce, here folded into a single sauce; the mustard, vinegar and lemon cut the richness, though note that this recipe specifies pork free from fat or skin. The costing in pence, given "exclusive of the cold meat," suggests a readership keeping household accounts, the point being that the expensive part had already been paid for.