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Roast Spare Rib
Trim off the ends neatly, crack the ribs across the middle, and sprinkle with salt and pepper. When the meat is first put in to roast, cover it with greased paper until half done; then remove the paper and dredge with flour. In ten minutes baste once with butter and afterward every fifteen minutes with the gravy. This is a necessity, for the spare-rib is a very dry piece. Just before taking the pork from the oven, strew its surface with bread crumbs seasoned with a little powdered sage, salt and pepper, and a bit of onion minced as fine as possible. Cook five minutes, and baste once more. Make the gravy as directed for a roast leg of pork; strain, and pour it over the meat or serve in a * gravy dish, as may be preferred.
Spare-ribs may be filled with the stuffing given for a little roast pig, half the quantity specified being used. The ribs are cracked crosswise the entire length in two places, the stuffing is placed in the center and the two ends folded over and tied.
A plain oven-roasted rack of pork ribs from the era before meat thermometers, when doneness was judged by time and the cook's eye. The instructions are sound; what they lack is a temperature, and that is the one thing worth supplying.
- Oven heatThe book gives none. A spare rib of this kind wants a steady moderate oven, 325-350F, for the whole roast. Anything hotter dries out a cut the recipe itself calls "a very dry piece."
- DonenessCook to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest part away from bone, then rest three minutes. Much later pork guidance called for 185F or beyond out of fear of trichinella; that fear is no longer warranted for commercial pork, and 185F is exactly what makes spare rib taste like sawdust.
- The cutA nineteenth-century spare rib is a fresh (uncured) pork rib cut, and in this context probably nearer to what a butcher today would call a rack of pork or bone-in loin rib roast than to the barbecue spare ribs sold in supermarkets, though period usage of the term varied. Ask for it bone-in and untrimmed, and ask the butcher to crack the ribs across as the recipe directs so it will carve and, if you are stuffing it, fold.
- Greased paperParchment, buttered or oiled, laid loosely over the meat for the first half of the roasting. Foil does the same job but traps more steam; parchment is closer to the original effect.
- Basting rhythmButter at ten minutes, pan juices every fifteen thereafter. This matters more than it would for a fatty cut — the rib has little internal fat to render, and the flour dredge only holds a crust if it is kept moist.
- The crumb finishFive minutes is the maximum. Bread crumbs with raw minced onion and sage will scorch quickly on a hot surface, and the onion needs to be truly fine or it will still be raw and sharp when the meat comes out.
- GravyThe recipe cross-references the gravy given for a roast leg of pork, which is not reproduced here; any standard pan gravy made from the drippings will serve. Strain before serving, as the recipe directs.
- If you stuff itCracked in two places and folded, a stuffed spare rib cooks unevenly — take the temperature in the meat, not the stuffing, and check more than one spot. Tie it at intervals with butcher's twine.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; judge by the size of the rib piece your butcher supplies.
Spare rib in this sense is a fresh-pork cut. On farms the pig was killed in cold weather and most of it was cured — hams, bacon, salt pork, sausage — but the ribs, backbone and other odds could not be cured profitably and had to be eaten fresh within days of slaughter, so roast spare rib was a killing-time dish. The sage-and-onion crumb strewn over the top belongs to the long English tradition of pairing sage with pork, the same partnership that gives sage-and-onion stuffing for goose and for the roast sucking pig this recipe cross-references. The origin of the name is unsettled: it is often explained from "spare" in the sense of lean or scanty, but it has also been derived from an older form meaning ribs roasted on a spit. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns, issued cook books as part of a broad line of domestic manuals aimed at the same middle-class housekeeper who bought its patterns and magazines.