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Roast Leg of Pork
Small Leg, Young Pork Sage, Onions Salt, Pepper Apple Sauce Cut a slit in the knuckle and fill with the chopped onions and seasonings.
When half done slice the skin in places, but do not go deeper than the outer rind.
Serve with apple sauce.
The original assumes a cook who already knows how to run a roast and needs only the seasoning scheme. Everything that matters — temperature, time, doneness — has to be supplied.
- What cut to buy"Small leg, young pork" suggests a small fresh ham, bone in, skin on; the weight is not stated and will vary. Ask for the shank end with the rind left on, since pork legs are often sold skinned, which would make the crackling instruction impossible.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Start at 450F for 20 to 30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325F for the remainder, allowing roughly 25 minutes per pound after the initial blast.
- DonenessCook to 145F at the thickest part away from the bone, then rest 15 to 20 minutes. Pork was long cooked well past that point, and fear of trichinosis is commonly given as the reason; commercial pork no longer carries that risk, and 145F is the current standard for whole cuts.
- The stuffed knuckleThe slit at the knuckle is packed with finely chopped onion, chopped or dried sage, salt and pepper; the recipe does not say how deep to cut. Push the filling in firmly and skewer or tie the opening shut, or it works its way out into the pan as the meat contracts.
- Scoring the skin"When half done" is unusual — modern practice scores the rind at the start, in parallel lines about half an inch apart, so the fat renders out from the beginning. Either way, the instruction not to cut past the outer rind is the one that counts: reach the meat and the juices weep up and steam the skin instead of crisping it.
- Dry skin, crisp cracklingPat the rind thoroughly dry and rub it with salt before it goes in. Do not baste the skin; baste the meat side only, or nothing at all.
- Apple sauceTraditionally plain and barely sweet: tart apples cooked down with a spoon of water and little or no sugar, as a foil to the fat rather than a sweet dish.
- YieldA 5 lb bone-in leg serves roughly four to six, possibly with some left for cold pork.
Sage, onion and apple have accompanied roast pork in English cookery for centuries, and the pairing carried into American books largely unchanged; the sharp fruit and the resinous herb are both traditionally explained as correctives to rich fatty meat, an idea that predates any nutritional reasoning. The stuffed knuckle here is a thrifty trick -- the shank end is the least tender part of the leg, and packing the cavity along the bone seasons it from the inside where a surface rub cannot reach. The brevity suits a book written for readers assumed to know already how to run a roast: it supplies the seasonings and the one detail easily got wrong -- cutting too deep when scoring the rind -- and leaves the rest.