Roast Pork
Select sparerib, loin, or shoulder for roasting. Wipe meat; place on pan; dredge meat and pan with flour.
Sprinkle with salt and pepper.
Bake in a moderate oven, allowing twenty-five minutes to the pound.
Serve with cooked apples in some form - apple sauce, apple jelly, or fried apples.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to handle a roast. The two things it leaves unsaid are the oven temperature and the internal temperature, and modern practice has changed the second one considerably.
- "Moderate oven"350F. Lowney's was written for cooks who judged heat by hand and flour-scorch; 325-350F is the range that matches the timings given here.
- Twenty-five minutes to the poundA figure well past modern doneness; long pork timings of this era are usually explained as insurance against trichinae, though the books rarely say so. A bone-in loin at 350F will reach 145F in something closer to 20 minutes per pound, and a thick shoulder takes longer per pound than a thin sparerib. Use a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Target temperature145F at the center for loin and sparerib, followed by a 10-minute rest, gives faintly pink, juicy meat that is entirely safe. Shoulder is the exception: it wants 195-200F so the collagen breaks down, which means several hours, not the time in this recipe.
- Dredging with flourFlour on the meat and in the pan browns the surface and toasts in the drippings; period cooks commonly went on to make gravy from that base, though this recipe stops short of saying so. If you do not want gravy, skip the pan flour or it will simply burn.
- The cuts"Sparerib" here usually means a rib roast or rack rather than the barbecue rib rack sold today. Loin is the modern bone-in center-cut loin roast; shoulder is picnic or Boston butt, and it is a braise-or-slow-roast cut despite being listed alongside the others.
- Fat capTurn-of-the-century pork carried far more fat than current breeds. Lean supermarket loin benefits from a light brining or from being roasted fat-side up with the fat left intact, since the recipe offers no basting or added fat at all.
- YieldFigure 3/4 lb per person for bone-in roasts; a 4 lb loin serves five.
Pork with apple is one of the oldest fixed pairings in English and American cooking, and the reasoning is agricultural before it is culinary: hogs were slaughtered in late autumn, when the apple crop was in and the cellar was full of sauce, jelly, and dried rings. Lowney's, published by the Walter M. Lowney chocolate company in the first years of the twentieth century as a promotional cookbook, is mostly remembered for its confectionery, but it also carries a plain meats chapter written in a clipped, rule-based style. The insistence on twenty-five minutes to the pound reflects the era's real anxiety about trichinosis in pork, a concern that shaped American cooking advice for most of the twentieth century; USDA guidance was not revised down to 145F for whole cuts until 2011.