Pork
SELECT a piece of loin from a young pig, 3 pounds in weight; score the rind across one eighth of an inch apart, season with tablespoonful salt and teaspoonful pepper; lay the pork in a roasting pan, place it in a medium hot oven, roast till light brown, basting with its own gravy; then add cupful boiling water; continue to roast and baste till nearly done, turn the meat over, so the rind lies in the gravy, roast ten minutes, turn it again, so the rind is on the top; let it remain five minutes longer in the oven, transfer to a hot dish, free the gravy from fat, mix 1 teaspoonful cornstarch with gill cold water, add it to the gravy, stir two minutes, add sufficient boiling water to make creamy sauce, strain, and serve with the meat.
Pork Tenderloins with Sweet Potatoes.
Wipe tenderloins, put in a dripping pan and brown quickly in a hot oven; then sprinkle with salt and pepper, and bake forty-five minutes, basting every fifteen minutes.
Two pork recipes run together here: a scored loin roast with a cornstarch pan sauce, and a brief note on tenderloins. Both are workable, but the temperatures are unstated and the loin's doneness target has changed.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures. Terms like "medium hot" and "hot" varied between cooks and stoves; modern equivalents are usually given as roughly 375-400F and 425-450F respectively. Browning at about 425F for twenty minutes and then dropping to 350F is one way to approximate what the original does by eye.
- A gillHalf a cup. Mixed with a teaspoon of cornstarch that is a thin slurry, which is the point — it disperses without lumping when it hits the hot gravy.
- Doneness, not timeThe recipe gives no total roasting time because it assumes a cook watching the meat. A 3 lb loin needs roughly 20 minutes per pound; pull it at 145F at the thickest point and rest 10 minutes. Pork of this period was generally cooked well past that; trichinosis fear is usually cited as a reason, and trichinosis in commercial pork is now very rare.
- Tenderloin timing is too longForty-five minutes will dry out a modern tenderloin, which weighs about a pound and is leaner than its 1900 counterpart. Fifteen to twenty minutes at 425F to 145F internal is the equivalent.
- The rind step is a trade-offScoring at eighth-inch intervals is the classic crackling cut, but turning the rind down into the gravy softens it. If crisp crackling is what you want, skip the flip, rub the dried rind with salt, and finish under high heat instead.
- Degreasing the gravyA 3 lb loin with its rind renders a great deal of fat. Skim it thoroughly or the cornstarch will not thicken cleanly — fat suspended in the sauce reads as greasy rather than creamy no matter how much starch goes in.
- SeasoningA tablespoon of salt on 3 pounds of meat is about right for a joint with skin, since much of it sits on the rind and does not penetrate. Apply it several hours ahead if you can; it also dries the surface, which helps browning.
- YieldThe 3 lb loin serves four to six, and one tenderloin serves two to three. The sweet potatoes named in the title do not appear in the text as given here.
Pork roasted with its rind on was a long-established joint in Anglo-American kitchens, and scoring the skin at close intervals is an old instruction in English cookery. The insistence on a young pig is practical rather than fussy: mature pork carried a stronger flavor and a tougher skin, and youth was a mark of quality in the market. What dates this version is the cornstarch. Thickening a pan gravy with cornstarch slurried in cold water, rather than with a flour roux or a bread crust, spread in American homes after corn starch became a cheap branded grocery item in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pork with sweet potatoes is often described as an American pairing, associated with autumn hog-killing season, when the sweet potato crop was also in.