Home › Sausages › Roast Loin of Pork
Roast Loin of Pork
Score the skin of a fresh loin of pork at equal distances, about a quarter of an inch apart. Brush it over with salad-oil, and place the joint into a hot oven. Baste liberally, and when done enough serve on a hot dish, and send brown gravy and apple sauce or Robert sauce to table with the meat. If liked, a little sage and onion stuffing may be served in a separate dish. It is better not to send it to table on the same dish as the meat, as many people object to the flavor. Time, a loin of pork weighing five pounds, about two hours. Sufficient for half a dozen persons.
A plain English roast that depends almost entirely on how the skin is handled. The scoring and the initial blast of heat are what turn the rind into crackling rather than leather.
- Score before you oilCut through the rind and just into the fat at quarter-inch intervals, without reaching the meat. A very sharp knife or a clean utility blade works better than a chef's knife on cold rind.
- Salad-oilThis means a bland table oil, historically olive oil. Any neutral oil does the job; rub it in along with a generous scattering of salt, which the original leaves unsaid but which draws moisture out of the rind.
- "A hot oven"Roughly 425 to 450F. Give it 20 to 30 minutes at that heat to blister the skin, then drop to 350F for the remainder, or the outside will be black before a five-pound loin is cooked through.
- Time and temperatureTwo hours for five pounds is generous by current practice. Cook to an internal reading of 145F at the thickest point, away from bone; depending on the thickness of the joint this may be reached before the two hours given, so go by the thermometer rather than the clock.
- Basting and cracklingBasting the meat is useful; basting the scored skin is not, as liquid softens it. Spoon the fat over the cut ends and leave the rind dry.
- Robert sauceSauce Robert is a brown sauce finished with onion, white wine or vinegar, and mustard. It is a made sauce rather than a condiment, so it needs to be started before the roast goes in.
- RestingNot mentioned in the original, but rest the joint 15 minutes in a warm place before carving. Tent it loosely at the ends only, leaving the crackling uncovered.
- YieldSix as written. A five-pound loin carves into roughly six thick chops or a dozen thinner slices, though the original does not say whether the joint is bone-in.
Roast pork with apple sauce and sage-and-onion stuffing is one of the fixed points of nineteenth-century English cookery, and the tone of this entry is very much that of the late-Victorian household manual: brief, confident, and more concerned with what goes on which dish than with how hot the oven is. The instruction to serve the stuffing separately because "many people object to the flavor" is a small piece of period social observation, sage being a strong and divisive seasoning in a era when it was used heavily in pork and poultry alike. Sauce Robert, offered here as an alternative to apple sauce, is one of the older named French sauces, generally traced to the sixteenth century and long associated with pork; its appearance beside plain brown gravy shows how far French sauce vocabulary had spread into English domestic cooking by the time compendia like this one were assembled.