Roast Pig
Select a pig about six weeks old, wash it thoroughly inside and outside; wipe Slice tenderloins crosswise and flatten; dry with a towel, salt inside and stuff a it with a rich fowl dressing, making it plump. Sew it up, place it in the dripping pan, salt and pepper the outside, baste with butter and water a few times as the pig warms, afterward with gravy from the dripping pan. Roast from two to three hours. Make the gravy by skimming off most of the grease; stir in the pan two tablespoonsful of barley flour, turn in the water to make it the right thickness, season and let all boil up once. Strain and turn into the gravy dish. Place the pig upon a large platter surrounded with parsley.
Send to the table hot. In carving, cut off the head first; split the back, take off the hams and shoulders and separate the ribs.
A whole suckling pig, written for a cook who owned a dripping pan and an eye for a hot fire. The instructions are sound but assume knowledge the book never states, and one line has plainly wandered in from a neighbouring recipe.
- The stray sentence"Slice tenderloins crosswise and flatten" has nothing to do with the rest of the method and appears to be a typesetting error. Read the opening as: wash the pig thoroughly inside and out, wipe it dry with a towel, salt inside, and stuff.
- The pig itselfA six-week suckling pig dresses out at roughly 15 to 20 lb and must be ordered from a butcher or a farm; it will not be in a supermarket case. Confirm it comes scalded, scraped and eviscerated, with the head on, since the carving directions assume it.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book gives no oven description of any kind. As a modern equivalent, a steady moderate oven of about 325F for the bulk of the time, with the heat raised at the end to crisp the skin, will serve.
- Doneness, not clock timeTwo to three hours is short for a pig of this size at moderate heat; plan on closer to 3 to 4 hours and go by a thermometer. The thickest part of the shoulder and ham should reach 145F for the meat, and any dressing packed inside the cavity needs 165F in its centre.
- The stuffing questionA rich fowl dressing sealed inside a large carcass heats slowly and is the part most likely to lag behind. Stuff loosely, or bake most of the dressing in a separate dish and use only enough inside to keep the pig plump.
- Barley flourBarley flour gives a softer, slightly nutty gravy; wheat flour in the same quantity works and thickens a little more firmly. The recipe leaves the liquid to the cook's judgement -- "turn in the water to make it the right thickness" -- so add it gradually; two tablespoons will thicken roughly a cup to a cup and a half.
- Basting and the extremitiesButter and water early, pan drippings later, is exactly right. Wrap the ears, snout and tail in foil for the first two-thirds of the roast or they will blacken long before the hams are done.
- Carving and yieldThe head comes off first, then the back is split, hams and shoulders removed and the ribs separated, which is still the practical order. A pig this size serves twelve to sixteen.
Roast suckling pig is one of the oldest set pieces of the European festive table, and by the time this book was printed it had become a Christmas and wedding-feast dish rather than everyday cooking. Its presence in a bride's cook book is a signal of ambition: the whole animal, brought to table on a platter ringed with parsley, was the kind of thing a new household was expected to be able to manage at least once, and the closing carving instructions are there to see the cook through the moment. The barley flour in the gravy is worth noting: wheat flour was already the standard thickener in nineteenth-century American kitchens, so barley here reads as a local or economical choice rather than a general pantry norm. The garbled line about tenderloins is a reminder of how these compilations were assembled, with contributed recipes set in tight columns.