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Pork, Spare-Rib of, Baked
Take a spare-rib of pork weighing about eight pounds, flour it well, and bake it in a moderate oven for three and a half hours. Just before serving sprinkle some chopped sage over, and baste with the gravy that comes from the meat. As the meat is generally very lean it should be frequently basted. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
A very plain roast, and the one thing worth knowing before you shop is that a British "spare-rib of pork" is not what an American butcher means by spareribs.
- The cutIn British butchery the spare rib is the upper shoulder, forward of the loin — a lean, well-flavoured joint sometimes sold as spare rib roast or shoulder blade roast. American spareribs are belly ribs and will not stand three and a half hours of dry heat. If your butcher cannot supply a bone-in shoulder joint, a boneless pork shoulder of similar weight behaves much the same.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere around 325-350F. At that temperature an 8 lb bone-in shoulder needs roughly 3 to 3½ hours, which matches the original closely.
- DonenessCook to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest point, away from bone, if you want it sliceable and faintly pink; 175-190F if you want the shoulder connective tissue to break down and the meat to pull. The old three-and-a-half-hour figure lands nearer the second.
- Why flour itThe flour dredge sets into a thin crust and browns early; it was traditionally held to seal the surface. It also thickens the drippings, which is what makes the basting liquid described here worth using.
- Basting a lean jointModern pork is leaner still than the book's, so baste every 20-30 minutes and add a little lard or oil to the tin if the drippings threaten to scorch. A shallow pool of water in the pan will keep the fond from burning.
- The sageAdded at the very end, which suits it: sage scorches and turns bitter under an hour of dry heat. Chop it fine and scatter it just before the joint goes to table.
- Resting and yieldRest 20 minutes under loose foil before carving. Eight pounds bone-in serves eight to ten generously, with cold meat left over.
- The price note"10d. per pound" is ten old pence, roughly 4p in decimal money, and is now useful only as a rough indicator of what the joint cost relative to other meats in the book.
Cassell's belongs to the great late-Victorian run of encyclopaedic household dictionaries, arranged A to Z so a cook or a mistress of the house could look up a joint and find a costing beside the method — hence the "probable cost" line that closes almost every entry. The spare rib was a butcher's-shop staple of exactly that kind: cheaper than loin, plainer than leg, and lean enough that the book's chief advice is simply to keep it moist. Sage with pork is one of the older fixed pairings in English cookery, running back through the sage-and-onion stuffings of the eighteenth century and generally explained as a way of cutting richness; here, with no stuffing and a lean joint, it survives only as a final scattering of green over the meat.