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Fresh Pork with Vegetables
1 pound pork butt 4 large carrots 4 large parsnips 1 small red cabbage Seasoning Boil the piece of pork one and one-half hours. Cook the vegetables in the same kettle until they are soft, then remove them and finish cooking the meat. Cut the pork into thin slices. Arrange them side by side down the middle of a large platter, and make a border of the cabbage, quartered, and the other vegetables cut into lengths.
A boiled dinner in miniature: one pot, one piece of pork, and the vegetables cooked in the same broth. The original assumes you know when each vegetable is done, which is the only real skill involved.
- The cut"Pork butt" here is the upper shoulder, sold today as Boston butt or pork shoulder roast. It is a collagen-rich cut, so the ninety minutes given is a minimum; simmer gently until a fork slides in with no resistance, usually closer to two hours for a whole piece.
- Simmer, do not boilA hard boil squeezes shoulder meat dry and clouds the broth. Keep the water at a bare shiver, barely breaking the surface, and keep the pork covered by liquid throughout.
- Stagger the vegetablesThey are not interchangeable in timing. Whole large carrots and parsnips need roughly 20 to 30 minutes, quartered red cabbage 10 to 15. Adding them all at once, as the wording invites, leaves the cabbage collapsed before the roots are tender.
- The cabbage will bleedRed cabbage releases anthocyanin into the pot and turns the carrots and parsnips a dull mauve. Cook it last, or in a ladleful of the broth in a separate pan, and a splash of vinegar in that pan will keep its color bright.
- "Seasoning"Undefined in the original, which expected salt and pepper. Salt the cooking water properly, about a tablespoon per four quarts, or the pork and the vegetables both come out flat. A bay leaf and a few peppercorns in the kettle cost nothing.
- DonenessWhole-muscle pork is safe at 145F with a three-minute rest, but shoulder is not worth eating there. Take it to 190F or so, where the connective tissue has broken down and it slices cleanly without shredding.
- Yield and the leftover brothOne pound of pork with this quantity of vegetables serves two, perhaps three lightly. The cooking liquid is a light pork-and-root stock; strain and save it rather than pouring it away.
New Delineator Recipes came out of the Butterick publishing house, which ran The Delineator as a women's magazine. The dish belongs to the long northern European tradition of the boiled dinner, where a cheap salted or fresh joint and whatever root vegetables the cellar held went into a single pot on the stove, the meat flavoring the vegetables and the vegetables flavoring the broth. Parsnips suggest its age: they were still ordinary winter fare in American kitchens in this period, and grew less common on American tables later. The instruction to arrange the slices down the center of a platter with a border of vegetables reflects the era's taste for composing even the plainest food before it reached the table.