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To Dress Pig's Fry
475. Boil the lights first, then chop them up, and put them to stew with a little broth or gravy, seasoning them with pepper and salt. Thicken with gravy; and if not brown, add a little of the gravy from the frying-pan, which, when the liver, &c., have been fried, is made by adding some flour and water to the contents of the frying-pan. Fry the liver as for steaks or chops (par. 474), then place it round the dish, with the minced lights in the centre. The heart should be stuffed and roasted, to form a separate dish.
"Pig's fry" is the loose set of pluck sold together at a pork butcher's: liver, lights (lungs), heart, and often the sweetbread and a piece of caul fat. The recipe assumes you have all of it at once and are dividing it into two dishes.
- Lights are lungsLung is illegal to sell for human food in the United States and hard to find in the UK outside a specialist butcher who will order it. If you cannot get it, the mince in the centre can be made from heart or extra liver instead, though the texture will be denser.
- The hinge: do not overcook the liverPig's liver turns dry and grainy if pushed too far, so slice it about 1 cm thick and fry it briskly in hot fat. Pork offal should nonetheless be cooked right through: take it to a firm centre that is no longer pink, then keep it warm while you finish the gravy.
- Boil the lights before choppingThis is not fussiness. Lung is spongy and holds air, so it needs simmering until firm before it can be chopped cleanly and stewed. Expect a good half-hour or more, skimming as it goes; the original gives no time.
- "A little broth or gravy"The original gives no quantity. Add only enough to keep the mince loose, and the cooking water from the lights can make up part of it.
- The frying-pan gravyFlour and water stirred into the liver pan is a straight deglaze thickened in place. Use roughly a tablespoon of flour to 200 ml liquid, scrape the browned residue up hard, and let it bubble two or three minutes so the flour loses its raw taste.
- Stuffing and roasting the heartA pig's heart takes a plain sage-and-onion or bread stuffing, and wants slow covered roasting rather than the quick heat you would give liver; allow well over an hour in a moderate oven. The original specifies neither stuffing nor temperature nor time. Bard it with bacon or caul fat; the heart carries little internal fat.
- ServingRinging the liver round a central mound of mince is a way of arranging a dish that turns up elsewhere in period cookery. One pig's fry would stretch to several people as a main course; potatoes would be a likely accompaniment, though the recipe names none.
- FreshnessOffal spoils faster than muscle meat. Buy it the day you cook it, and reject liver that smells sour or has a greenish cast.
Pig's fry is associated with the killing of the cottage pig: the pluck was eaten fresh because it would not keep while the carcass was salted down for bacon and hams. It was cheap offal, and pork butchers sold the set together. The recipe cross-refers to an earlier paragraph for frying liver rather than repeating the method. Lung has since largely dropped out of the British and American food supply, which makes this the sort of entry that now reads as social history as much as instruction.