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Roast Little Pig
Clean, wipe, and stuff a three-weeks-old pig. Skewer into shape; place on rack in pan; rub with butter, dredge with flour, and sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Place in moderate oven; when heated through increase heat, baste every ten minutes with melted butter, turning often to cook and brown uniformly.
Cook from three to four hours, according to size of pig. Serve on hot platter on a bed of parsley. Garnish with apple sauce in red apple shells, lemon and parsley.
A whole suckling pig is still a special-order item but an entirely practical roast; the vagueness here is in the oven temperatures and the total absence of a doneness test.
- Size of the pigA three-week-old suckling pig dresses out at roughly 12 to 18 lb, which is what a butcher will supply if you ask for a suckling or milk-fed pig. Measure your oven before ordering: an 18 lb pig is close to 30 inches nose to tail and often needs to go in diagonally or with the head removed and roasted alongside.
- Oven temperaturesThe recipe gives none. 'Moderate oven' is conventionally read as about 350F. The recipe raises the heat once the pig is heated through, i.e. early in the roast rather than at the end; around 400F for the remainder is what crisps the skin.
- The doneness test the recipe lacksThree to four hours is a reasonable estimate, but go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part of the shoulder and the hind leg, clear of bone: 160 to 165F. A young pig is mostly skin, bone and thin muscle, so it can reach temperature well before the stated time.
- Turning it "often"Rotating a whole pig by hand is unrealistic in a domestic oven. Set it on a rack in the roasting position you want, prop the belly and legs with crumpled foil, and rotate the pan itself every 30 minutes instead.
- Protect the extremitiesEars, snout and tail char long before the loin is done. Cover them with foil from the start and take it off for the last 20 minutes. Score the skin lightly in a diamond pattern before roasting so it crackles rather than blisters and splits.
- The stuffingNo stuffing is specified; a bread-based dressing is the usual period choice, though the recipe does not say which. A dense stuffing in a sealed cavity slows the roast and must itself reach 165F, so pack it loosely, or bake it separately and fill the cavity with quartered apples and onions for aroma alone.
- Basting with butterButter helps the color but its water content softens skin. If crackling matters more to you than gloss, baste with the rendered pan fat for the first two hours and leave the skin dry and unbasted for the final high-heat stretch.
- Apple shells and carvingThe garnish is hollowed-out red apples filled with apple sauce; a small apple in the mouth is the period convention and needs a block of wood or a ball of foil holding the jaw open during roasting. Rest the pig 20 to 30 minutes before carving. A pig this size serves 8 to 12.
Roast suckling pig was the standard show-piece roast of the Anglo-American festive table from the eighteenth century into the early twentieth, and its presentation here — skewered into shape, laid on parsley, ringed with apple shells — follows a form long familiar from English cookery books. That it appears in a chocolate manufacturer's cook book is a reminder of what those volumes were: general-purpose household manuals carrying a brand, with meat chapters ranging from a plain beef stew to a whole pig. The pairing with apple sauce is older than the recipe and often explained as a foil to the richness of the fat, though it also reflects the ordinary autumn coincidence of pigs being killed when apples were in store.