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Oast Leg of Pork
Score the skin in squares, or in parallel lines running from side to side. Sprinkle the meat with salt and pepper, dredge lightly with flour, and roast slowly, twenty-five minutes to a pound. Pour off all but two tablespoons of the fat. Place the pan on top of the stove, and when hot, stir in two tablespoons of flour. Cook one minute, and add one pint of hot water, stirring constantly. Let the gravy cook three minutes, and season with salt and pepper. Those who do not object to a hint of onion in flavoring will find it a great addition to place a small onion in the pan while the meat is roasting. This, of course, is removed before the gravy is made; but it takes off the extrem "pig" flavor that is so disagreeable and noticeable in old pork.
A plain roast of fresh (uncured) leg of pork with a pan gravy. The heading is a printer's slip for "Roast Leg of Pork."
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockTwenty-five minutes to the pound comes from a time when home kitchens rarely had a meat thermometer, and before trichinosis control; on a large leg it can mean four to five hours. Use an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from bone: 145F for a rosy, sliceable roast, or 175-185F if you want the connective tissue in a whole leg fully softened for pulling.
- "Roast slowly"No oven temperature is given; a moderate oven, roughly 300-325F, fits the timing stated. A short blast at 450F for the first twenty minutes helps the scored skin start to blister before you drop the heat.
- The scoring is the hingeCut through the skin and into the fat but not into the meat, at roughly half-inch intervals. Dry the skin thoroughly and salt it before it goes in; damp skin steams instead of crackling.
- The flour dredgeA light dusting of flour on the meat was standard practice to help browning. It will also stick to the skin and can burn over a long roast, so keep it off the scored surface if you want clean crackling.
- The gravy proportionsOne pint is two cups. Two tablespoons each of fat and flour to two cups of liquid gives a distinctly thin gravy by current taste; three tablespoons of each is closer to modern expectations. Whisk rather than stir when the water goes in.
- The onionA whole small onion in the roasting pan works, but it sits in fat and often scorches over several hours. Halving it cut-side down, or adding it for the last hour, gets the flavor without a bitter pan.
- "Old pork"The strong flavor the author is masking came largely from mature, unimproved lard hogs kept well past a year. Supermarket pork is slaughtered young and is far milder; the onion is now a matter of preference, not a corrective.
- YieldWeights vary widely: a whole bone-in leg can run 15 lb or more, while half legs are commonly sold at 8-12 lb and will serve twelve to sixteen with leftovers. A half leg, or a boneless leg roast of 4-5 lb, is a more manageable buy.
A fresh leg of pork is the same cut that, brined and smoked, becomes ham instead of a roast, and in many American households of the period it was the ham that got made. Curing the leg preserved it through the year; roasting it whole was a thing you did at killing time in late autumn, or in a city house that could buy fresh pork from a butcher without needing to keep it. The *Butterick Cook Book* (1911) came out of the pattern-and-magazine publisher whose *Delineator* reached a large middle-class readership, and its meat chapter is written for exactly that reader: someone buying by the cut rather than butchering at home. The aside about the "extreme 'pig' flavor... noticeable in old pork" is the most dated line in the recipe and the most informative. Nineteenth-century hogs were bred for lard and often kept well past a year, and the meat carried a heaviness that modern breeding and early slaughter have largely removed.