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Crown Roast of Pork
1 crown of pork Cubes of salt pork Mashed potatoes Steamed apples Salt and pepper Cranberries Select ribs of a young pig and have the butcher make a crown, like a crown roast of lamb or mutton. Cover the tip of each bone with salt pork. Roast as spareribs are roasted, and serve with mashed potatoes inside the crown and a border of bright red steamed apples as a garnish. The apples should be of uniform size and steamed, rather than baked, to preserve their color. Remove the cubes of salt pork and cap each bone with a large cranberry, or with a paper frill.
A crown roast is a butcher's job as much as a cook's: two or more rib racks bent into a circle and tied, bones up. The original assumes you know how spareribs are handled, so the numbers below fill that gap.
- What to orderAsk for two center-cut pork rib racks, 7 to 9 ribs each, frenched and tied into a crown. Allow two ribs per person; a 10-lb crown of 16 ribs serves eight generously.
- Oven and temperatureThe original gives no temperature, only 'roast as spareribs are roasted.' A workable modern approach: start at 450F for 15 minutes to color the outside, then drop to 325F for the remainder. Timing varies a good deal with the size and shape of the crown, so cook to temperature rather than to the clock.
- DonenessPull the roast at 145F in the thickest muscle, away from bone, and rest it 15 minutes. Cookbooks of this period commonly recommended taking pork to 185F on account of trichinosis; that risk is negligible in commercial pork now, and 185F gives you dry meat.
- The salt pork capsTheir only job is to keep the exposed bone tips from charring. Foil caps do the same thing and come off cleanly. If you use salt pork, skewer a cube firmly onto each bone or it will slide off as the fat renders.
- Keeping the center clearRoast the crown empty, or with a ball of foil in the middle to hold its shape. Mashed potato spooned in at the start will scorch and absorb drippings; add it in the last few minutes, or fill the crown after the roast comes out.
- Steamed applesSmall red apples of uniform size, steamed whole over simmering water until a skewer meets no resistance; the time depends on size and variety. Steaming rather than baking is what preserves the bright skins, which is the reason the original gives for the instruction.
- Cranberry capsThese are raw and decorative only. Choose firm unblemished berries and press one onto each bone tip just before the roast goes to the table. Paper frills, sold as chop frills, are the alternative and are easier to handle.
- CarvingCut down between the ribs at the table; each chop comes away whole. Snip and remove the butcher's twine first or the crown will fight you.
The crown roast is a display joint that migrated into American home cooking through the butcher shop: racks of lamb, mutton or pork tied into a circle, bones up, dressed with frills, and carried to the table whole. It belongs to a style of service in which the joint was displayed before it was carved, and its appeal was largely visual, which explains the fussing here over apples that must be steamed rather than baked so the skins stay bright. The Delineator was a Butterick fashion magazine with a substantial domestic department, and its recipe collections lean toward dishes a middle-class hostess could set down as a centerpiece. Pork, cranberries and apples together mark this as a cold-weather holiday roast; the paper frill offered as an alternative to the cranberry is the same disposable chop frill that survives today, largely unchanged.