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Pork, Neck of, Rolled and Roasted
Take the neck or spring of fresh young pork. Have the bones removed, and spread evenly over the inside a forcemeat made of three table-spoonfuls of finely-grated bread-crumbs, two table-spoonfuls of chopped sage, a little pepper and salt, and a beaten egg. Roll and bind the meat tightly in a nice shape. Put it to roast before a clear fire, though at a good distance from it, and baste liberally. Send good brown gravy to table with the pork. If liked, the forcemeat may be omitted, and TOMATO SAUCE, POIVRADE SAUCE, or SOUBISE SAUCE may accompany the meat. Time to roast the pork, twenty-five minutes per pound. Probable cost, 9 1/2 d. per pound.
A boned, stuffed and rolled pork roast written for a spit turning in front of an open fire. The method translates to an oven with two changes: the timing and the way you judge doneness.
- The cutThe neck of pork is the fore-end, sold today as neck end, collar or shoulder butt, boned and rolled by the butcher. "Spring" is an old butchery term whose application varied between trades, so the exact cut it names here is not certain. Ask for the skin left on and scored if you want crackling, or removed if you plan to brown the surface of the roll directly.
- Roasting before a fire"Before a clear fire, at a good distance" means radiant heat on a turning spit, with a dripping pan beneath for the basting. The oven equivalent is 350F, with the roast on a rack over a shallow pan. A short blast at 425F for the first twenty minutes helps if the skin is on.
- Time per poundTwenty-five minutes per pound reflects spit roasting and the long roasting times usual in the period; whether it also owed anything to fear of trichinella is guesswork. A boned and rolled shoulder in a modern oven wants an internal temperature check rather than a clock: 145F for a rosy centre, or take it to 190F and beyond if you want the collar meat to pull apart.
- Stuffing and temperatureBecause the forcemeat is rolled inside the joint, the thermometer should go into the centre of the stuffing, not just the meat. Egg-bound breadcrumbs in the middle of a roll are the slowest part to heat.
- The forcemeatThree tablespoons of crumbs is a thin smear over a large joint; scale up to roughly a cup of fresh crumbs and one egg for a four-pound roll. Note that the original ratio is three parts crumbs to two parts sage, so a quarter-cup of sage is a deliberate reduction rather than a proportional scaling. "Chopped" suggests fresh sage, though dried was also used, and it is assertive at that quantity.
- Binding"Roll and bind tightly" means butcher's twine at inch intervals. A slack roll cooks unevenly and the stuffing escapes into the pan.
- BastingBasting was necessary in front of a fire, where the surface dried fast. In a closed oven it does little beyond opening the door and dropping the temperature; if the joint has skin, leave it dry so it crisps.
- The saucesPoivrade is a peppery brown sauce sharpened with vinegar; soubise is an onion purée bound with béchamel. Both are cross-references to other entries in the same dictionary, not something the recipe expects you to improvise.
- Yield and costA four to five pound boned neck serves six to eight. The 9½d per pound is a retail price note of the kind Cassell's gave throughout, useful now only as a marker of what pork cost relative to beef.
Cassell's belongs to a generation of large Victorian household dictionaries that treated cookery as reference material: alphabetical entries, cross-referenced sauces, and a costing for every dish so that a mistress could check the kitchen accounts. The pork-and-sage pairing recorded here is much older than the book — sage was long held to counter the richness of pork, and the combination survives in British sausage and in the sage-and-onion stuffing of a Christmas goose. Boning a neck and rolling it around forcemeat was economical rather than grand: it turned an awkward, bony fore-end into a joint that carved into neat rounds and stretched further at table. The instruction to roast "at a good distance" from a clear fire is a reminder that the closed range was still competing with the open hearth and the mechanical jack in many households when this was written, and that a cook was expected to read a fire the way a modern one reads a dial.} ```