Home › Cookery › To Barbecue Shoat
To Barbecue Shoat
Lay the shoat in water till ready for use; if small, it will cook in an hour. Put in the oven with two spoonfuls of water, a piece of lard, and dredge with flour. When ready for use, pour in half a teacup of walnut catsup, and, if not fat, a piece of butter.
A characteristically terse Virginia entry that assumes the cook already knows what a shoat is and how a wood-fired oven behaves. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- What a shoat isA shoat is a young pig, weaned but not yet fully grown; period usage covered a wide range of sizes rather than one fixed weight. Few modern butchers stock one, so a fresh whole pork shoulder or a bone-in fresh ham of 6-8 lb is the practical stand-in, and the method transfers directly.
- "Barbecue" here means the ovenDespite the title, this is a roast. In nineteenth-century cookbooks "to barbecue" was often used loosely for a split carcass cooked slowly with basting, over coals or in an oven; whatever the wider usage, this recipe says the oven plainly enough.
- Soaking in water"Lay the shoat in water till ready for use" is unexplained; it may have served to draw residual blood or simply to keep the meat cool and fresh until wanted, a habit of home slaughter. With inspected, chilled pork there is little to gain, and a long soak will waterlog the surface. Skip it, or use a light brine if you want the seasoning.
- The temperatureNo oven is specified. A moderate oven, 325-350F, suits this; the flour dredge and the small amount of water in the pan want steady heat rather than a fierce one.
- The hour is not to be trustedAn hour will not carry any joint of real size through. Cook to an internal 145F at the thickest point, rested ten minutes — for a 6-8 lb shoulder expect three hours or more. The original was written for cooks judging a small carcass by eye.
- Measures"Two spoonfuls" is unspecified but in recipes of this date most often means tablespoons. A teacup is conventionally reckoned at about three-quarters of a cup, which would make half a teacup of walnut catsup roughly 6 tablespoons — enough to make a sharp pan sauce, not a marinade.
- Walnut catsupA dark English condiment made from green, unripe walnuts salted and steeped with vinegar and spice; it is savoury and mushroomy, not sweet, and nothing like tomato ketchup. Mushroom catsup or a good Worcestershire is the closest substitute still sold.
- Dredge and finishFlouring the meat gives colour and lightly thickens the pan juices into gravy when the catsup goes in. Add the catsup only at the end, off the heat or with the pan just simmering, so its vinegar edge stays bright.
- YieldA shoulder of the size suggested will serve eight to ten, with the pan gravy poured over.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered contributions from some two hundred and fifty Virginia housekeepers, and its brevity here is typical: the recipes were written by women for women who had already watched the dish being made. The word barbecue is generally traced to the Taino barbacoa, a wooden frame for cooking over fire, carried into English through the Spanish Caribbean in the seventeenth century; by the time of this book it had long since become a fixture of Virginia and Carolina hospitality, denoting both the method and the social occasion. Walnut catsup places the recipe firmly in an older, English-facing tradition of Southern cookery \,, catsups were made from walnuts, mushrooms, oysters and anchovies before tomato ketchup dominated, a way of keeping strong savour on hand through the year.