Roast Pork
Wipe pork, sprinkle with salt and pepper, place on a rack in a dripping-pan, and dredge meat and botton of pan with flour. Bake in a moderate oven three or four hours, basting every fifteen minutes with fat in pan. Make a gravy as for other roasts.
Farmer gives no weight, no cut and no internal temperature, which is the one thing a modern cook needs. The method itself is sound — an uncovered rack roast, floured for colour and pan gravy.
- Moderate ovenRead this as 350°F. For a fatty shoulder you can drop to 325°F and simply extend the time; the loin does better started hot for 20 minutes and then finished at 325°F.
- Which cutThe recipe names neither cut nor weight. A three-to-four-hour roasting time only makes sense for a sizeable piece — a bone-in loin or fresh shoulder of several pounds — whereas a modern boneless loin of 3 lb will be done in about 1¼ hours.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockUse a thermometer in the thickest part. Loin and rib roasts are done at 145°F with a 3-minute rest and will still be faintly pink. Shoulder and other collagen-heavy cuts want 190–200°F, which is where the long time in the original belongs.
- Why the times are so longNineteenth-century advice pushed pork to grey throughout as insurance against trichinosis. Trichinella infection from commercially raised pork in the US and Europe is now very rare, though not eliminated, and the USDA lowered its recommendation for whole cuts to 145°F in 2011.
- Dredging with flourFlouring the meat and the pan bottom is not decorative — the flour toasts in the drippings and becomes the thickener for the gravy, so you are making a roux in the pan as the roast cooks. Do not skip the pan floor.
- BastingEvery fifteen minutes is more than a modern oven needs and costs you heat each time the door opens. Three or four bastings over the whole roast is plenty; a fatty cut bastes itself.
- The gravy"As for other roasts": pour off most of the fat, leave the browned flour and fond, whisk in about 1 cup of stock or water per 2 tablespoons of drippings, simmer until it coats a spoon, season. Deglaze while the pan is still hot.
- YieldA 5 lb bone-in roast serves 6 to 8. Rest it 15–20 minutes before carving, loosely covered.
Fresh pork was a seasonal, largely domestic meat in the America Fannie Farmer wrote for: pigs were killed in cold weather, and much of the animal went into salt pork, ham, bacon and lard. The instruction to dredge meat and pan with flour is the older English roasting habit carried into the range-cooked era — flour dusted on a joint helped it brown and gave the drippings body. The insistence on three or four hours reflects the period's fear of trichinosis, a parasite of undercooked pork described in the first half of the nineteenth century and linked to human disease by the 1860s; the shift to shorter cooking waited on decades of change in how hogs were fed and inspected.