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To Roast Shoat
The hind-quarter is considered best. Cut off the foot, leaving the hock quite short. Wash well and put into boiling water; simmer until done, adding salt and pepper just before lifting from the kettle; salt put in sooner hardens and toughens. Place the meat in a baking-pan and score across, in the direction in which it is to be carved. Skim several ladlefuls from the top of the kettle and pour over; after this has dried off, sprinkle over a little salt and pepper, cover with an egg beaten stiff, sift over powdered cracker, and set to brown. Lay around sweet potatoes first parboiled, then cut in thick slices. Serve with minced parsley and thyme, both on the meat and the gravy.--Mrs. S. T.
TO ROAST A FORE QUARTER OF SHOAT.
Put it on in hot water, boil for half an hour; take it out, put in a pan, gash it across with a sharp knife, in diamond shapes, grease it with lard and dredge with flour, pepper and a little salt. Peel some good Irish potatoes, lay them around the pan and set in the stove to brown, basting frequently. This meat should be cooked done, as it is not good the least rare. Grate some bread crumbs over it and serve.--Mrs. P. W.
Two versions of the same idea: a young pig's quarter poached first, then finished in a hot oven under a crust. The parboiling does most of the cooking, so the oven stage is about colour and crust, not doneness.
- What a shoat isA shoat is a weaned young pig, roughly 30 to 60 lb dressed, so a hind quarter is a large fresh ham on the bone and a fore quarter is the shoulder. A whole fresh ham or a bone-in pork shoulder of 6 to 10 lb behaves the same way and is what a butcher can actually supply.
- Salt at the end, and whyThe instruction to hold the salt until just before lifting the meat is the hinge of the first recipe. Modern practice disagrees for dry cooking, where salting ahead helps, but in a long simmer the point stands well enough: an aggressively salted poaching liquid draws moisture out of the exterior over an hour or more of cooking. Season the water lightly if you like and correct at the end.
- Simmer, do not boil"Put into boiling water; simmer until done" means bring up to the boil, then drop to a bare 180-190F. A hard boil for the hour and a half or more a large quarter needs will squeeze the muscle fibres and leave the meat stringy.
- "Skim several ladlefuls from the top"This is the rendered fat and rich liquid floating on the pot, not the whole broth. It is being used as a baste to seal and flavour the scored surface before the egg goes on.
- Egg beaten stiff, powdered cracker'Beaten stiff' most likely means the white alone, whipped until it holds its shape, spread over the hot meat as glue; the recipe does not say which part of the egg. 'Powdered cracker' is finely crushed plain soda or water crackers; unseasoned cracker meal or fine dry breadcrumbs stand in exactly.
- Oven heatNeither cook gives a temperature; both say only to set the meat to brown. For that browning stage a hot oven, 425 to 450F, for 20 to 30 minutes will do it. Any lower and the egg-and-crumb coat goes pale and damp rather than crisp.
- Irish potatoesIn nineteenth-century Southern books "Irish potato" simply distinguishes the ordinary white potato from the sweet potato. Whole peeled potatoes laid in the fat around a shoulder will need the full browning time and frequent basting; halving them helps.
- DonenessMrs. P. W. is right that this cut is no good rare, though the reason is texture rather than trichinosis, which is not the hazard in commercial pork that it was. A shoulder is collagen-heavy and wants to reach 190-200F internally to become tender; a leaner fresh ham is generally taken lower. Either way the half-hour boil in the fore-quarter version is nowhere near enough on its own, so extend the simmer until a skewer slides in freely before the meat goes to the oven.
- YieldA quarter of a shoat would have fed a large table. A 7 lb bone-in shoulder treated this way serves eight to ten with the potatoes.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions signed with initials, is a book written for households that killed their own hogs. Pork was central to Virginia cookery, and a shoat, a pig too young for the smokehouse, was fresh meat, cooked and eaten within days rather than salted and hung. Hog-killing was done in cold weather, and roasting a whole quarter would have been an occasion. The two-stage method here, poach then glaze and brown, appears elsewhere in the period's cookbooks for large joints, where an oven could not easily be trusted to cook a heavy piece of meat through without scorching the outside; boiled-then-baked hams with an egg-and-crumb crust are the obvious relatives. The parsley and thyme finish and the ring of sweet potatoes are the Southern touches.