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Pig's Fry, To Dress
INGREDIENTS for dish for 4 persons.-1½ lb. of pig's fry, 2 onions, a few sage-leaves, 3 lbs. of potatoes, pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE COST, 1s.
Put the lean fry at the bottom of a piedish, sprinkle over it some minced sage and onion, and a seasoning of pepper and salt; slice the potatoes, put a layer of these on the seasoning, then the fat-fry, then more seasoning, and a layer of potatoes at the top. Fill the dish with boiling water, and bake for 2 hours, or rather longer.
TIME. Rather more than 2 hours.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
PIGEON, TO CARVE.
Pig's Liver. (A Savoury and Economical Dish.) - INGREDIENTS for dish for from 6 to 8 persons. The liver and lights of a pig, 6 or 7 slices of bacon, potatoes, 1 large bunch of parsley, 2 onions, 2 sage-leaves, pepper and salt to taste, a little broth or water. AVERAGE COST, 1s. 6d.
Slice the liver and lights, and wash these perfectly clean, and parboil the potatoes; mince the parsley and sage, and chop the onions rather small. Put the meat, potatoes and bacon into a deep tin dish, in alternate layers, with a sprinkling of the herbs, and a seasoning of pepper and salt between them; pour on a little water or broth, and bake in a moderately-heated oven for 2 hours.
TIME.-2 hours.
SEASONABLE from September to March.
Two layered offal-and-potato bakes of the same family, printed here with some stray type from neighbouring entries. The opening fragment ("into two precisely equal and similar parts") and the floating heading "PIGEON, TO CARVE" belong to adjacent carving articles, not to these dishes.
- What pig's fry isThe assorted soft offal taken from a freshly killed pig: liver, heart, lungs ("lights") and often a piece of caul fat, sold together by the pound. The recipe's distinction between "lean fry" and "fat-fry" is not explained in the text, but presumably separates the leaner organ meat, put at the bottom, from the fattier pieces layered in the middle.
- Lights are not availableLung cannot legally be sold for human food in the United States and is rarely stocked elsewhere. Build the dish from liver and heart, or ask a butcher who breaks whole pigs; the layering and seasoning work unchanged.
- Oven temperatureA "moderately-heated oven" is usually rendered as something around 350F/180C in modern terms; the book itself gives no numbers. Both dishes sit in liquid, so the heat is gentle and the exact figure matters little.
- Two hours will ruin the liverPig's liver is fully cooked in a few minutes and turns dry and grainy long before the potatoes are done. The sensible order is to bake the potatoes, onions, herbs and bacon with the broth for about 90 minutes, then slide the sliced liver in for the last 15 to 20 minutes so it is just set through.
- Slice the potatoes thinThe first recipe relies on raw sliced potato cooking in the liquid; slice them thinly for an even result. The second version parboils them first, which is the more reliable route.
- LiquidFill only to just below the top layer of potato so the surface browns rather than stews. Stock in place of the specified boiling water gives a better result, and is what "a little broth" means in the second recipe.
- SageTwo sage leaves for six to eight people is very restrained by modern palates; "a few" in the first recipe is nearer the mark. Six to eight leaves, finely minced, suits a pound of offal.
- Cost and yield1s. and 1s. 6d. are low costings for dishes feeding four and six to eight. The yields hold if the potatoes are counted as the bulk of the meal, with nothing more than bread alongside.
- Season"September to March" corresponds to the cooler pig-killing months, when offal, which spoils quickly, would be dealt with soon after slaughter. It has no bearing on a modern kitchen beyond the fact that fresh offal should be used the day it is bought.
Pig's fry was the by-product of the household pig-killing that still structured rural and small-town life in Victorian Britain: the soft organs spoiled fastest, so they were shared out among neighbours or cooked at once, while the carcass went to bacon and hams. Beeton's two entries turn on an argument that is arithmetical as much as culinary, a shilling feeding four and eighteen pence feeding eight. The layered construction, offal and onion and sliced potato baked together in one dish with water poured over, is the same economical logic as Lancashire hotpot or the Scottish and Irish versions of the same idea, and it survived in cookery books as "pig's fry" well into the twentieth century before organ meats fell out of everyday English eating after the Second World War.