Roast Spareribs
Pork spareribs
Powdered sage (may be
Salt and pepper omitted)
Flour
Minced onion
Bread-crums
Butter, fat or cooking oil
Trim the ends of the ribs neatly, crack them across the middle, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Cover the meat with greased paper and leave this paper on until the meat is half done; then remove the paper and dredge the meat with flour. In ten minutes, baste with butter, fat or cooking oil, and afterward baste every fifteen minutes with the gravy. This is a necessity, as this meat is very dry. Just before taking the pork from the oven, strew its surface with bread-crums mixed with the seasonings. Cook five minutes, and baste once more. Make the gravy as directed for roast leg of pork, strain, and pour it over the meat, or serve in a gravy-dish.
The book assumes you know how to run a roasting oven and gives neither temperature nor time. Both are worth pinning down before you start, and the basting instruction is not optional padding.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given. Roast at 325-350F. Anything hotter will render the fat off before the connective tissue has softened, which is precisely the dryness the recipe warns about.
- How longA full rack of spareribs (3-4 lb) needs about 2 to 2 1/2 hours at 325F, covered for the first half. "Half done" in the original therefore means roughly an hour in.
- DonenessModern guidance for whole cuts of pork is 145F, but ribs eaten at 145F are tough. Take them to 190-200F at the thickest point between the bones, where the collagen has melted and the meat pulls back from the tips.
- Greased paperButtered or oiled paper laid directly on the meat, standing in for a lid. Parchment or loosely tented foil does the same job; the point is to trap steam early, then expose the surface to brown.
- Basting is the hingeSpareribs have little internal fat to spare once rendered. Baste every fifteen minutes as directed, using the pan drippings once they accumulate, or the meat will be dry regardless of temperature.
- Crack them across the middleThis means cutting partway through the bones at the centre so the rack folds and fits the pan. A heavy knife or cleaver against the bone, or a butcher, will do it.
- Bread-crumsProbably dry crumbs rather than fresh soft ones, mixed with the seasonings (the recipe makes the sage optional). Five minutes is all the recipe allows them; watch that they do not scorch.
- The gravyThe cross-reference is to the roast leg of pork, which is not reproduced here; the usual pan method of the period is to pour off most of the fat, stir flour into what remains in the pan, brown it, then whisk in stock or water and simmer before straining.
- YieldOne rack of spareribs serves three to four as a main course.
Spareribs are the least prized part of the pig's side, the bones left after the belly is cut away for bacon, and they turn up in household books like this one precisely because they were cheap. The name is generally traced not to sparseness but to the Low German ribbesper, ribs roasted on a spit, which English speakers are thought to have reversed into something that sounded like their own words; the derivation is probable rather than settled. The recipe's insistence on greased paper, flour dredging and relentless basting reflects a period problem rather than a period preference. Butcher's pork of the period was fattier overall than today's, but the rib bones themselves were as lean then as now, and a coal or gas range gave a cook far less control over dry heat than a thermostat does. The crumb crust strewn on at the end, seasoned with sage, is the same seasoning logic that governs pork stuffings across nineteenth-century English and American cookery, applied to the outside of the meat instead of the inside.