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Wild Boar, Haunch of, with Cherry Sauce
Get a quarter of young wild boar, fresh and without rind; take out the thigh-bone, and saw off the thin end; salt the meat, put it in a kitchen basin, pour over it a quart of cold cooked marinade stock (see below), let it macerate for two or three days, drain, wipe it on a cloth, and put it into a deep roasting-pan with lard. Cover the joint with greased paper, roast it in the oven for three-quarters of an hour, basting often with the fat; then add a few spoonfuls of its marinade, and cook half an hour longer, basting with its own stock. When done withdraw the roasting-pan from the oven, drain the quarter, and spread on its surface a thick layer of bread-crumbs rasped, dried, pounded, sifted, and mixed up with a little sugar and cinnamon, then moistened with red wine, but only just enough to give a proper consistency. Sprinkle over the layer some dry bread-crumbs, baste with the fat of the roasting-pan, into which put the quarter back, and keep it at the entrance of the oven for twenty minutes, basting often. When ready to serve take it up, put a ruffle on the bone, dish up, and serve separately the following sauce. Cherry sauce.--Soak in water two handfuls of black dry cherries, as commonly sold in Germany--that is, with the kernels; pound them in a mortar, dilute with a glassful of red wine, and pour the preparation into a sugar-pan. Add to it a piece of cinnamon, two cloves, a little salt, and a piece of lemon-zest. Let the preparation boil for two minutes, and thicken it with a little diluted potato-flour; draw the pan to the side of the fire, cover it, keep it there for a quarter of an hour, and pass the sauce afterwards through a sieve. The cooked marinade mentioned above is prepared thus: First of all some chopped roots and vegetables must be fried with butter, these are moistened with common vinegar, in quantity nearly sufficient to cover the meats intended to be marinaded. When the vegetables are well saturated, mix with the liquid a little salt, cloves, peppercorns, and other spices. The marinade should continue cooking at least twenty-five minutes. Sometimes a little water is mixed with the vinegar, in order to mitigate its pungency.
The roast itself belongs to a recognisable continental tradition, but two elements of this recipe put it outside what can be reproduced safely today: the deliberate pounding of cherry stones into the sauce, and the handling of the meat before and during cooking.
- The cherry kernels are the fatal flawThe cherry kernels are the main problem -- The sauce calls for dried cherries "with the kernels" to be pounded in a mortar and simmered. Cherry stones contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the kernel is crushed and wetted. Hydrogen cyanide is volatile and a boil will drive some of it off, and the sauce is sieved before serving, but a brief two-minute boil and a covered quarter-hour infusion are not a controlled way of dealing with it. This is the same chemistry that makes bitter almonds hazardous.
- "Two handfuls" is not a dose"Two handfuls" is not a measurement -- The original gives no weight and no distinction between sweet and sour dried cherries, only "black dry cherries, as commonly sold in Germany," so there is no way to know how much crushed kernel is going into the pan.
- Wild boar and trichinellaWild suid meat is a recognised carrier of Trichinella and of other parasites that domestic pork inspection has largely eliminated. A bone-in haunch given roughly an hour and a quarter under greased paper, then twenty minutes at the oven mouth, is unlikely to reach a reliably safe internal temperature throughout. Freezing cannot be relied on with game, as some of the species involved are freeze-tolerant.
- Three days in a kitchen basinThe joint macerates for two or three days in a cooled vinegar marinade in a kitchen basin, with no temperature given. In a modern kitchen this is uncontrolled temperature abuse of raw game, and the acid in the marinade is not a substitute for refrigeration or for cooking to temperature.
- The marinade itself is unquantified"Chopped roots and vegetables," vinegar "nearly sufficient to cover," "other spices" — there is no acidity figure, no salt percentage and no volume. Nothing in it can be treated as a preservative step.
- SourcingWild boar is a game species whose sale is subject to game and hygiene regulations, and in some jurisdictions wild-shot meat may not be sold at all. A fresh, rindless quarter of a young wild animal is in any case not a straightforward order today.
- If you want the dishThe crumb-and-cinnamon crust with a sour cherry sauce is worth cooking. Use a current recipe for farmed boar or pork leg, with stoned cherries and a measured internal temperature.
The combination here — game marinated in spiced vinegar, roasted, then finished with a sweet crumb crust of bread, sugar and cinnamon moistened with red wine, and served with a sour cherry sauce — is central European rather than English, and the recipe half admits it by referring the reader to the dried cherries "as commonly sold in Germany." Sweet-sour and fruit-with-meat pairings are often said to have survived far longer in German, Austrian and Bohemian cooking than in British, where they are generally thought to have retreated to a jar of redcurrant jelly beside the venison; the spiced crumb coating belongs to the same family as the crumb and gingerbread thickenings used in dishes like Rehrücken and sauerbraten. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, generally placed around the turn of the century or the Edwardian years — the earlier Dictionary of Cookery being the Victorian one — and compiled as an alphabetical reference for a household that might be asked to produce anything, gathers such continental formulas alongside plain English roasts, which is why an entry for a whole haunch of wild boar sits in a book most of whose readers would never see one. The unstoned dried cherries are a period detail rather than an error of the compiler: crushed stones were used deliberately for their bitter-almond perfume, in sauces, ratafias and creams, well before the toxicity of amygdalin was generally understood.