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Pork Spare-Rib
With stuffing of sage and onions, roasted spare-rib, done over the potatoes, affords a good substitute for goose.
A single sentence standing in for a whole roast. The method is all there, but it assumes you know what a spare-rib is, how a sage-and-onion stuffing is made, and that the potatoes go underneath to catch the fat.
- Which cut this isIn nineteenth-century usage, following English butchery, the "spare-rib" is the rib section cut from the shoulder end of the pork side, sold with a good deal of meat still attached — closer to a bone-in pork shoulder roast or a rack of pork than to the thin barbecue ribs sold under the name today. Ask for a bone-in blade-end pork roast, four to six pounds.
- "Done over the potatoes"The roast sits on a rack or directly on the bones above a layer of peeled, halved potatoes, which cook in the rendering fat. Use a shallow pan so the potatoes brown rather than steam, and turn them once when they have taken colour on the underside.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no oven direction. As a modern reconstruction: start at 425F for 20 minutes to set the crust, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- Timing and donenessRoughly 20 to 25 minutes per pound, but go by a thermometer: current guidance for whole cuts of pork is 145F at the thickest point away from bone, then a rest (15 minutes suits a joint this size). A shoulder-end cut is often taken somewhat further for tenderness. The old rule of roasting pork to grey opacity produces a dry joint.
- The stuffingThe recipe gives no proportions. A typical sage and onion stuffing is two large onions parboiled and chopped, a dozen fresh sage leaves chopped fine (or about a tablespoon dried), a cup of breadcrumbs, salt, pepper and an ounce of butter or pork fat. Dried sage is stronger than fresh, so use roughly half what a fresh-leaf count suggests.
- Where the stuffing goesA spare-rib has no cavity. Either pocket the meat between the bones and the flesh and pack it in, or bake the stuffing separately in a dish under the roast where it will take the drippings. The latter is easier and browns better.
- YieldA five-pound bone-in roast with potatoes and stuffing serves six to eight.
Sage and onion is the stuffing of roast goose in English cookery, and the whole point of this entry is the substitution: pork fat, sage, onion and potatoes cooked in the drippings give something close to the flavour of a goose dinner at a fraction of the cost. Mock-goose dishes are often said to have circulated in British and American cookery, and the phrasing here assumes the reader already knows what a goose dinner tastes like. Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, gathered contributions from Virginia households in the years after the Civil War, when pork was the cheap and abundant meat and geese were not. The extreme brevity is characteristic of the book: these were notes passed between cooks who needed a reminder, not a lesson.