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Roast Pork Loin Rib
The meat is usually cut quite close from these and used for steaks. Follow the general directions for roasting and allow 30 minutes for each pound. Serve with apples roasted in the same pan or fried. Save all the drippings from the baking pan and see that the glaze is all dissolved. If the oven has not been too hot, this fat will serve for frying and the gravy can be made to serve with the cold roast.
A rib-end loin roast written for a period when pork was cooked hard for safety reasons that no longer apply. The times are the one thing to disregard entirely.
- The timing is the hingeThirty minutes per pound will give you grey, dry meat. Pork loin is done at an internal temperature of 145F at the centre of the muscle, then rested 10 minutes; in a 325-350F oven that is roughly 20 minutes per pound for a bone-in rib roast, but the thermometer decides, not the clock.
- Why the old rule existedTrichinosis anxiety kept American cookbooks demanding well-done pork into the 1970s. The parasite is destroyed well below 145F, and it is essentially absent from commercial pork now.
- "General directions for roasting"The book assumes you have read its master roasting entry. In practice: season, set the roast fat side up on the rib bones so they act as a rack, and give it an uncovered oven with no added liquid.
- The rib end and the "steaks"The opening line means the loin muscle has already been trimmed close to the bones to cut chops. Ask a butcher for a bone-in rib roast, chine bone cracked, or a rack of pork; 4-5 lb serves six to eight.
- Apples in the panWhole roasted apples will collapse into the fat over a long roast. Halve firm cooking apples, core them, and add them for the last 30-40 minutes.
- The glaze"Glaze" is the browned, sticky reduction on the pan bottom. Deglaze with stock, cider or water while the pan is still hot and scrape until nothing is stuck; that is where the gravy comes from.
- Saving the fatThe caution about an oven that has been "too hot" is sound. Scorched drippings taste bitter and will carry that into anything fried in them. Strain the clear fat off the meat juices, refrigerate, and use within a week or two.
Pork with apples is a long-established pairing in Northern European cooking, and the combination came to America with English and German settlers. What dates this particular entry is not the dish but the housekeeping around it: the instruction to save every scrap of drippings, dissolve the pan glaze, and stretch one roast across a hot dinner, a cold platter, a gravy and a frying medium is characteristic of early twentieth-century household cookery, which expected a cook to plan the second and third meal before the first left the oven. The generous thirty minutes per pound reflects the era's insistence that pork be cooked until no pink remained, a rule that has since been formally revised downward.