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Roast Spare Ribs
Trim ragged ends neatly, crack ribs across the middle, rub with salt and sprinkle with pepper. Fold over, stuff with a turkey dressing. Sew up tightly, place in a dripping pan with pint of water; baste often; turn and bake both sides a rich brown.
A stuffed and folded rack of spare ribs, cooked slowly with water in the pan. The original assumes you know your own range, so the numbers below are the ones it leaves out.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given. Bake at 325-350F; the pint of water in the pan means this is closer to a covered braise for the first stretch than a dry roast. Uncover or spoon off liquid near the end so the surface can brown.
- What to buyA full side of spare ribs, about 3 to 4 lb, still in one slab. Ask for it untrimmed of the flap if you want enough width to fold; St. Louis-cut ribs are squared off and will fold less generously.
- "Crack ribs across the middle"Score through the bones at the midpoint with a heavy knife or cleaver so the slab hinges without snapping apart. A butcher will do this in seconds if asked.
- Turkey dressingPeriod shorthand for a plain bread stuffing: stale bread, butter or suet, onion, sage or summer savory, salt and pepper, moistened with a little stock. Roughly 3 to 4 cups loosely packed for a slab this size.
- The temperature that mattersStuffing enclosed in meat is the slow spot. Cook until the center of the dressing reads 165F and the pork itself is at least 145F; on a slab this size that is usually 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Do not judge doneness by the browning alone.
- Sewing it upUse butcher's twine and a trussing needle, or simply skewer the edges closed and tie the slab crosswise at 2-inch intervals. Snip the twine before carving.
- Basting and turningBaste every 20 minutes and turn once at the halfway point. Add hot water if the pan threatens to go dry, since the drippings will scorch and sour the gravy.
- YieldServes four to six.
Stuffed spare ribs belong to the old economy of the home-butchered hog, when a family took delivery of a whole pig in cold weather and had to find a use for every part in short order. The ribs were among the less valuable cuts, thin on meat and awkward in shape, so cooks bulked them out with the same bread-and-sage dressing they would have used for poultry and treated them as a roast. That is likely why the direction reads "a turkey dressing" rather than giving a recipe: a cook of the period would have been expected to have one already.