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Pork, Shoulder of, Marinaded
Lay a shoulder of pork in a deep earthen pan, pour over it half a pint of vinegar, and put with it a dessert-spoonful of salt, a tea-spoonful of bruised peppercorns, half a lemon, two onions sliced, a tea-spoonful of juniper berries, half a dozen cloves, and a bay-leaf. Let the pork lie in this pickle for five days, and turn and rub it every day. Take it up, drain it, cover it with oiled paper, and roast before a clear fire, though at some distance from it. Baste liberally with the strained pickle. For sauce, mix a quarter of a pint of the pickle with a quarter of a pint of cold water; add half a tea-spoonful of brown thickening, and a little pepper and salt if required. Serve in a tureen.
A five-day vinegar cure that turns a cheap shoulder into something closer to a fresh ham. Two things need attention: where the meat sits during those five days, and the fact that the basting liquid becomes a sauce.
- Refrigerate the pickleThe deep earthen pan belonged in a cold larder, and in most houses that was the only cold storage available. Use a non-reactive dish or a heavy zip bag in the refrigerator for the full five days, turning and rubbing daily as directed.
- The sauce must boilThe strained pickle has been in contact with raw pork for five days. Diluted with water and thickened, it still needs to come to a full rolling boil for a couple of minutes before it goes in the tureen. This is the one step the original takes for granted.
- Imperial measuresCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so half a pint of vinegar is about 1¼ US cups, and a quarter pint is 5 fl oz, a generous ½ cup. A dessert-spoonful is roughly two teaspoons.
- Brown thickeningThis is the book's own preparation of flour toasted in a pan until nut-brown, sometimes with butter, kept on hand as a jar of instant gravy base. The recipe's half a tea-spoonful of plain flour, cooked in a little of the pan fat until it colours, does the same work.
- Oiled paperPaper brushed with oil or dripping, used to keep the surface from scorching in the fierce radiant heat of a spit. Parchment or loose foil serves the same purpose; take it off for the last half hour so the outside colours.
- Fire to ovenRoasting "at some distance" from a clear fire means steady moderate heat, not a blast; 325-350F is a reasonable oven equivalent, though the book gives no temperature. A bone-in shoulder of 5 to 6 lb will want somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes per pound. Pork is safe at 145F, but shoulder is a working muscle and most cooks will prefer it carried further, to around 185F, where the connective tissue has softened; pushed to 195F it will shred rather than slice.
- BastingVinegar and lemon in a hot pan will catch and turn acrid. Add a little water to the roasting tin and baste with the diluted pickle rather than pouring it neat over the joint.
- YieldA shoulder of this size serves eight to ten.
Marinading a shoulder in vinegar with juniper, cloves and bay is a frugal English adaptation of a much older continental habit: the same aromatics, in wine or vinegar, were used across northern Europe to treat wild boar and venison, and juniper in particular is the marker of that game tradition. The shoulder was the cheap end of the pig, coarser and more sinewy than the leg, and five days in an acid pickle both softened it and gave it a keeping quality that mattered in a house without refrigeration. The recipe demonstrates the point rather than the dish, that a marinade is simultaneously a tenderiser, a seasoning and a preservative, and that the liquid is too valuable to throw away when it can be basted back over the meat and then finished as a sauce.