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Roast Pig's Backbone
There is almost no waste to a fattened hog; ears, feet, tail, and sausage casings all have their culinary uses everything but the squeal. And a choice piece for roasting whole outdoors is the backbone with its tender sweet fillets, after ribs and bacon have been cut off. Just roast or barbecue it and eat with barbecue sauce.
The instruction here is barely two lines, so most of the work is in sourcing the cut and controlling the fire. What follows fills in the numbers the original assumes you already know.
- What the cut actually isThis is the vertebral column with the loin meat still attached, taken after the spareribs and side (bacon) have been removed. Supermarkets rarely stock it; ask a butcher who breaks whole hogs for "pork backbones" or "country-style backbone," often sold in 3-4 lb sections.
- TemperatureCook it low: 275-300F, whether in an oven or with indirect coals. The strips of loin along the bone are lean and will dry out fast at roasting heat, while the meat between the vertebrae needs time to give up its connective tissue.
- DonenessAim for 190-200F in the meat wedged between the bones, not the 145F you would use for a boneless loin. At that point the backbone pulls apart with tongs. Expect roughly 2 to 3 hours for a 4 lb section.
- Salt aheadSeason the whole piece with salt at least 4 hours and up to a day before cooking. Fresh pork backbone is unbrined and unseasoned, and surface salt alone will not reach the meat in the crevices.
- Sauce timingBarbecue sauce of the sweet tomato type burns well below roasting temperature. Cook the meat plain and brush sauce on only in the last 15 minutes, or serve it alongside as the original suggests.
- YieldBackbone is mostly bone. Count on 1 to 1 1/4 lb of raw weight per person, so a 4 lb section serves three or four with sides.
- The trimmingsThe passage's list of ears, feet and tail is context, not part of this dish. Those cuts are more often simmered than roasted.
Backbones belong to hog-killing time, the cold-weather slaughter that governed the American farm calendar before home freezers. Ribs, side meat and hams went to the smokehouse or the salt box, but the backbone did not cure well and was generally eaten fresh soon after the killing, which made it a feast cut rather than a keeping cut. In parts of the South backbones were cooked with rice, or stewed with cornmeal dumplings; roasting the piece whole over coals, as here, may be a cookout adaptation of that older kitchen dish. The line about using everything but the squeal is a proverb of long standing in hog-raising country.