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Roast Pork (Select leg loin spare-rib)
Select leg, loin, spare-rib or shoulder. If the skin is left on, cut it with a sharp knife in lines running both ways. Add water and bake in a moderate oven, allowing from twenty to thirty minutes to the pound. Serve with apple sauce. 2 1 738 1. Head 4 5 6 8 345 7 2. Shoulder 3. Back 2 4. Middle cut 5. Belly 6. Ham 1 7. Ribs 8. Loin
A terse working note rather than a full recipe: choose a cut, score the rind, add water to the pan, roast. The numbered list at the end is the caption to a pork-carcass diagram, keying the cuts on the illustration.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty to thirty minutes a pound in a moderate oven will carry a whole-muscle joint well past the point of juiciness and leave it dry and grey. Modern practice is an instant-read thermometer: 145F at the thickest point for whole-muscle cuts such as loin and leg, with a three-minute rest. Time per pound varies with the size and shape of the roast, so the thermometer, not the clock, is the guide.
- Why the old times were so longThe long roasting is usually explained as insurance against Trichinella spiralis, once a real risk in pork. Trichinellosis is now very rare in commercial herds, and USDA lowered the recommended whole-cut temperature to 145F in 2011.
- "A moderate oven"Conventionally about 350-375F. Some cooks start pork hot, around 450F for fifteen minutes to set the crackling, then drop to a moderate heat for the remainder.
- Shoulder and spare-rib are the exceptionThese are collagen-rich and want the opposite treatment: 300-325F until the interior reaches 195-205F and the meat pulls apart. A shoulder taken to 145F will be tough.
- Scoring the skinCut through the rind and fat but not into the meat, at roughly half-inch intervals in both directions. Dry the skin thoroughly and rub with salt; moisture is what keeps crackling from puffing.
- The water in the panA cup or so in the bottom of the roasting tin keeps drippings from scorching and gives you a base for gravy. Add it under the rack, not over the skin, or the crackling will steam instead of crisp.
- Apple sauceMeant as a sharp, barely sweetened foil to the fat, not a dessert compote. Bramley or another tart cooking apple, a splash of water, minimal sugar.
- YieldAllow about 12 oz bone-in or 6-8 oz boneless per person; a 4-5 lb bone-in loin serves about five or six.
Loose-leaf cook books like this one were sold as binders so a housekeeper could add printed pages, clippings and her own notes. The entries are compressed: they assume a cook who already knows how to run an oven and needs only the cut, the heat and the sauce. The diagram key appended here, running from head and shoulder through middle cut, belly and ham, reflects a period when whole or half hogs were bought from a butcher or killed on the place, and a housewife was expected to recognise the primals rather than read a shrink-wrapped label. The pairing of roast pork with apple sauce is long-standing in British and American cookery and is generally explained as acid cutting richness; it appears in English household books well before this one. The generous twenty-to-thirty minutes a pound is often said to be a fossil of the trichinosis era, when American cookery writing insisted pork be cooked until no trace of pink remained.