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Roast Loin of Pork
Wipe pork with wet cloth. Put into pan in very hot oven for 20 minutes, or until well seared, then add 1 teaspoon salt, 1/8 teaspoon pepper and 1 cup cold water. Roast slowly 3 to 4 hours. Add water as necessary. To gravy, add 1 tablespoon flour mixed with cold water, 1 tablespoon caramel, and salt and pepper to taste. Boil 2 minutes, or until thick.
A plain sear-then-slow-roast method from an era when pork was cooked until there was nothing pink left anywhere. The technique still works; the timing does not.
- The timing is the thing to changeThree to four hours reflects fear of trichinosis and a fattier, older animal. A modern bone-in loin of 4-5 lb reaches 145F at the centre in roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours after searing; pull it there and rest 10 minutes.
- Oven temperaturesPeriod charts generally put a "very hot" oven somewhere around 450-500F; 450-475F is a reasonable modern reading for the initial sear. "Roast slowly" is usually taken as something near 325F.
- CaramelNot confectionery caramel but browning liquid: sugar cooked to dark bitterness and let down with water, sold then in bottles and used mainly for colour. A tablespoon of commercial gravy browning, or a teaspoon of dark soy, does much the same job, though browning brings a faint bitterness and soy adds salt; without either the gravy is simply pale.
- The cup of cold waterIt keeps drippings from scorching and makes the pan liquid the gravy is built on. Top it up as it evaporates, but keep it shallow — the roast should sit above it, not stew in it.
- Cut and fat capAsk for a bone-in loin with the fat left on and the chine bone cracked, which makes carving between the ribs possible. Today's loins are bred much leaner than 1920s pork, so a thin fat cap is worth insisting on.
- ThickeningA tablespoon of flour slaked in cold water thickens about a cup of liquid to gravy consistency. Skim most of the fat off the pan juices first, then boil the full two minutes to cook out the raw flour taste.
- SeasoningOne teaspoon of salt for a whole loin is light by current habit; salting the meat an hour ahead, or the night before, gives better results than seasoning after the sear.
- YieldA 4-5 lb bone-in loin serves six to eight.
Loin roasts of this kind fill the meat chapters of American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1930s, and the long slow times owe a good deal to trichinosis anxiety: public health advice of the period urged that pork be cooked thoroughly throughout, and without reliable thermometry that was translated into hours rather than degrees. The New Royal Cook Book was published by the Royal Baking Powder Company, one of the great promotional cookbooks of the era, given away or sold cheaply to put the brand in the kitchen; its savoury chapters read as workmanlike filler around the cakes and biscuits. The tablespoon of caramel is a small period marker of its own — bottled browning was a common item in the American pantry then, and colour was easier to buy than to build.<br><br>Note that the meat thermometer, which would have settled the whole question, was not yet standard household equipment when this was written.