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Stuffing for Pork
Three large onions parboiled and chopped, two cups fine bread crumbs, two tablespoons powdered sage, two tablespoons melted butter substitute, or pork fat, salt and pepper to taste.
A plain sage-and-onion stuffing of the English type, written for a cook who already knew how much a pork loin or shoulder would hold. It needs almost no translation, but two of its quantities are worth rethinking.
- The sage is the hingeTwo tablespoons of powdered sage is a great deal for two cups of crumbs by modern taste. Start with two teaspoons, taste the raw mixture, and build from there.
- Butter substituteIn books of this period the phrase usually means margarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter, lard or the pan fat from the roast all work; the recipe's own second choice, pork fat, is the best of them.
- Bread crumbs'Fine crumbs' in books of this date usually means dry crumbs from stale bread rather than the fresh soft crumb of a modern loaf, and certainly not packaged panko. Dry crumbs will drink up more fat and onion liquid than fresh, so hold back a little of the onion water if the mix looks pasty.
- Parboiling the onionsFive minutes in boiling water softens them and takes the raw edge off. Drain well and reserve a few spoonfuls of the liquid; the mixture as written has no other moisture and can bake dry.
- No binderThere is no egg and no stock, so this holds together only loosely. One beaten egg turns it into a stuffing that slices; leave it out if you want a crumbly dressing spooned around the meat.
- If you stuff the roastStuffing packed inside pork sits in the coolest part of the joint. Check the centre of the stuffing itself with a thermometer and take it to 165F, which on a pork loin generally means the meat is done first and the stuffing needs a few minutes more. Baking it separately in a dish avoids the problem entirely.
- YieldAbout three cups, enough for a 4 to 5 lb loin or shoulder, or a shallow baking dish serving six.
Sage and onion with pork is a long-established pairing in English cookery, carried into American kitchens more or less unchanged and repeated in many nineteenth-century household manuals. The reasoning was practical as much as culinary: sage is pungent enough to stand up to fat meat, and onions were cheap and kept all winter. The phrase butter substitute suggests a date after margarine and hydrogenated vegetable shortening had become widely sold, and may point to the First World War years, when butter was scarce and such fats were promoted as patriotic economy -- though the term was in use earlier as well. The offhand alternative of pork fat, the roast's own drippings, belongs to the same habit of thrift.