Pork: Pare
Pare six potatoes and parboil ten minutes, drain, put in pan with meat, and cook until soft, basting when basting meat.-FANNIE M. FARMER.
Pork Chops, Sauce Robert.
Take 8 rib chops, trim them neatly; have ready some finely chopped onion and parsley; sprinkle each chop on both sides with this, also salt and pepper, and beat lightly with a broad knife, to make all adhere. Dip each one into slightly beaten egg, then roll into fine bread crumbs; let stand five minutes; dip into melted butter, and roll again in the crumbs.
Arrange in a wire broiler and broil seven minutes over a clear fire. Chop fine 2 large onions, place in a stewpan with 1 tablespoonful butter, and cook slowly until well colored; add 1 tablespoonful flour, stir, and brown again, add slowly 1½ cupfuls beef stock and 2 tablespoonfuls vinegar. When smooth and thick, simmer until reduced to 1 cupful, add 1 teaspoonful mixed mustard, salt, and pepper to taste. Pour this around the chops as they are dished.
Bobble Gash (German recipe). 1 pound lean pork, 1 pound veal, 1 tablespoonful lard, 3 onions, 5 potatoes, 1 cupful cream, 1 tablespoonful flour.
Cut the pork and veal in small pieces. Put the lard in a kettle; when hot, add the onions sliced. As they commence to brown, drop in the meat and stir constantly until brown; then cover with water and boil three fourths of an hour. Season with salt and pepper. Pare and cut in small dice the potatoes; when boiled, add them to the meat with the cream. Thicken with flour.
Boston Pork and Beans.
Pick over and wash a quart of dried beans the night before you bake them. Put them to soak in cold water. In the morning, pour off the water, put them in a kettle, then cover with plenty of cold water, and set to boil. Cook till perfectly tender; turn off the bean water; put them MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK into a pot; score in lines the rind of a piece of pork and bury it, all but the surface of the rind, in the middle of the beans. Add enough boiling water to the beans to cover. Stir in 2 tablespoonfuls molasses and a teaspoonful fresh mustard. Cover the pot and put in the oven. Bake moderately, but steadily, five hours. If the water wastes away so as to be below the surface of the beans, supply enough just to cover them. Toward the end of the time, it may be allowed to dry down enough to permit the pork to brown. Uncover the pot for a little while for this purpose.
Roast Pig.
A pig for roasting should not weigh over 6 or 7 pounds after being cleaned. When it has been prepared by the butcher, lay it in cold water for fifteen minutes, then wipe dry, inside and out. Make a stuffing as for a turkey, adding two beaten eggs.
Stuff the pig to his original size and shape. Sew him up, bend his fore legs backward, his back legs forward under him, and skewer into shape. Dredge with flour and set, with a little salt water, into covered roaster. At the end of twenty minutes remove the cover again, rub the pig with butter, and brown for ten minutes. Serve very hot with apple sauce.
Homemade Sausage. a Take of lean young pork 1 pounds tenderloin, the rest any lean cut, 4 pounds, and fat, 2 pounds; put it through a sausage grinder-twice, perhaps three times, until of the desired fineness. Use for each pound of meat, 1 teaspoonful powdered, dried leaf sage, 1 teaspoonful salt, teaspoonful pepper, and nutmeg; nutmeg may be omitted if preferred.
A quantity of sausage may be made at a time and preserved for regular use if one has a cold storeroom in which to keep it. It should be packed in jars and covered an inch thick with melted lard, which will preserve it.
Sauerkraut with Spareribs.
This is a run-together page from a pork chapter, holding fragments of half a dozen dishes. Two of them — the roast pig and the lard-sealed sausage — cannot be followed as printed, and are flagged below; the chops, the Bobble Gash and the baked beans are sound period cooking that only needs translating.
- Roast pig: the timing is unusableTwenty minutes covered plus ten minutes to brown will not bring a stuffed 6–7 lb suckling pig anywhere near a safe internal temperature, and the bread-and-egg stuffing sits in the coldest part of the carcass. The printed instruction appears to be a fragment with the main roasting period dropped out. Use a current whole-pig recipe with a thermometer rather than this one.
- Sausage under lard: not a preservation methodSausage under lard: not a reliable preservation method -- Fresh pork seasoned with sage and salt and sealed under an inch of lard in a "cold storeroom" is uncured, low-acid meat held in an oxygen-poor environment at an unmeasured temperature, the conditions under which Clostridium botulinum can grow. The recipe nowhere specifies how cold the storeroom must be. Make the sausage if you like, but treat it as fresh meat: refrigerate and use within two days, or freeze.
- The chops are the best thing hereSauce Robert is a mustard-and-onion brown sauce, and the seven minutes of broiling assumes a thin rib chop over a fierce coal fire. Under a modern broiler, allow more like 5–6 minutes a side for a ¾-inch chop and pull it at 145°F with a short rest. The double crumbing — egg, crumbs, melted butter, crumbs again — is what keeps the coating from falling into the fire.
- "Beef stock" and reductionThe sauce starts with 1½ cups stock plus 2 tablespoons vinegar and simmers down to 1 cup. Commercial stock is saltier than homemade, so hold the salt until after the reduction. "Mixed mustard" means prepared mustard, not dry powder.
- Bobble GashThe name appears to be a phonetic rendering of a German dish name, though the original has not been identified; the method is straightforward. Three-quarters of an hour of boiling suits shoulder pork and veal, but do not add the cream until the very end and keep it below a simmer. Thicken by slaking the tablespoon of flour in cold water or a little cream first, or it will lump. Serves four to five.
- Boston baked beansA quart of dried beans is roughly 1 3/4 lb, and swells to feed eight or more. The book gives no temperature; "bake moderately, but steadily" for five hours points to a slow oven, and 300-325F is a reasonable modern equivalent. Keep the pot covered and the liquid just at the bean line until the last half hour.
- The salt porkThe scored piece buried in the beans is most likely salt pork rather than fresh, which would explain why the recipe adds no salt. A 6-8 oz piece for a quart of beans is about right. Only two tablespoons of molasses here, less sweet than many later versions.
- Parboiled potatoes with a roastThe opening Fannie Farmer fragment belongs to a roast: ten minutes' parboiling, then into the roasting pan to finish in the fat. Drain them well and let the steam dry off before they go in the pan, or they will not crisp.
The page is a good cross-section of what an American cookbook meant by "pork" around 1900: a French chop with sauce Robert borrowed from restaurant cookery, a German immigrant stew set down phonetically, the New England Saturday-night bean pot, a suckling pig, and instructions for putting up the family's own sausage. Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in the French repertoire, mentioned by Rabelais in the sixteenth century and codified by Carême and Escoffier as a brown sauce finished with onion, vinegar and mustard. Boston baked beans are traditionally traced to the Puritan Sabbath, when a pot set in the cooling brick oven on Saturday evening could be eaten cold or warm on Sunday without kindling a fire — the molasses is often said to be a trace of the colonial triangle trade with the West Indies. The sausage entry is the most telling: it assumes a household that kills or buys a whole hog and has a cold room to keep it in, a world in which home preservation was an ordinary domestic skill rather than a specialist one.