Pork, Hashed
INGREDIENTS.-The remains of cold roast pork, 2 onions, 1 teaspoonful of flour, 2 blades of pounded mace, 2 cloves, 1 tablespoonful of vinegar, 1/2 pint of gravy, pepper and salt to taste. AVERAGE Cost, exclusive of the meat, 3d.
Chop the onions and fry them of a nice brown; cut the pork into thin slices, season them with pepper and salt, and add these to the remaining ingredients. Stew gently for about 1/2 hour, and serve garnished with sippets of toasted bread.
TIME.- hour.
SEASONABLE from October to March. - INGREDI- Pork, Boiled Leg of.
ENTS. Leg of pork; salt. AVERAGE COST, 8d. per lb.
For boiling, choose a small, compact well-filled leg, and rub it well with salt; let it remain in pickle for a week or ten days, turning and rubbing it every day. An hour before dressing it, put it into cold water for an hour, which improves the colour. If the pork is purchased ready salted, ascertain how long the meat has been in pickle, and soak it accordingly.
Put it into a boiling-pot, with sufficient cold water to cover it; let it gradually come to a boil, and remove the scum as it rises.
Simmer it very gently until tender, and do not allow it to boil fast, or the knuckle will fall to pieces before the middle of the leg is done. Carrots, turnips or parsnips may be boiled with the pork, some of which should be laid round the dish as a garnish. A well-made pease-pudding is an indispensable accompaniment. TIME. A leg of pork weighing 8 lbs., 3 hours after the water boils, and to be simmered very gently. SEASONABLE from September to March.
Note. The liquor in which a leg of pork has been boiled makes excellent pea-soup.
PORK, LEG OF.
Two entries have been run together on this page: a hash made from cold roast pork, and a leg of pork that the cook is told to salt down at home for a week or ten days. The hash is a straightforward reheat; the salting instruction is the part that does not transfer to a modern kitchen.
- Why the cautionThe boiled leg begins with dry-salting a raw 8 lb joint and leaving it "in pickle" for seven to ten days, turning it daily. No quantity of salt, no curing salt, and no temperature are given — Victorian larders ran cold, modern kitchens do not, and an under-salted joint held for a week at room temperature is a botulism and general spoilage risk. Use a current, measured curing recipe or buy the gammon ready cured; the boiling instructions themselves are unremarkable.
- The hinge of the hashCold cooked pork does not need half an hour. Build the sauce with the onions, flour, spices, vinegar and gravy, simmer that for twenty-five minutes to thicken and mellow, then slide the thin slices in for the last five to warm through. Stewed the full time they go grey and stringy.
- Blades of maceA blade is one piece of the lacy aril from around a nutmeg. The recipe asks for it pounded, i.e. already ground; two blades is very roughly a quarter to half a teaspoon of ground mace, though published equivalences vary. Ground mace loses its perfume fast, so buy it in small amounts.
- Half a pint of gravyAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Leftover roast gravy is meant, but well-flavoured pork or chicken stock works — it will need reducing or a little more flour, since the original gravy was already thickened.
- Frying the onions"Of a nice brown" means properly browned and caramelised, which takes ten to fifteen minutes over medium heat, not a brief softening. The fat is unspecified in the original. The colour is the only browning in the dish.
- The flourOne teaspoon into half a pint is a very light binding. Stir it into the fried onions and cook it a minute before the liquid goes in, or it will taste raw.
- SippetsTriangles of toasted bread, crusts off, stood around the edge of the dish. Cut them just before serving; they are there to be dipped, and they go soggy quickly.
- Yield and seasonableThe remains of a joint will feed two to four depending on what is left. "Seasonable from October to March" reflects pre-refrigeration pig-killing, when pork was considered safe only in cold months — it has no bearing on when you cook it now.
Hashes like this one are the working end of Victorian household economy: a large joint was roasted for the principal meal, and what remained came back the next day sliced into a spiced gravy, or minced, or made into rissoles. Mrs Beeton costs the dish at threepence "exclusive of the meat," which is the whole point — the expensive part was already paid for. The seasoning is conservative and old-fashioned even for 1861: mace, cloves and a spoonful of vinegar are the standard English sharpening for pork, the acid cutting the fat much as apple sauce does in a roast. The accompanying leg-of-pork entry preserves the older rhythm of the year, when pigs were killed in the cold months and the meat salted down in a tub at home; the note that the boiling liquor makes pea soup, and that pease pudding is "indispensable," points to the same long association of salt pork with dried peas that runs through English cooking from at least the medieval period.