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Baked Pork
The skin, if left on, should be well scraped with a dull knife, and afterwards wiped thoroughly with a wet cloth and scored into little squares. If, however, the skin has been removed trim off some of the loose fat, cut out the chine or backbone, disjointing it from the ends of the ribs so that it may facilitate the carving of the meat. Place in a drippingpan a few slices of carrot, turnip and onion, together with a dozen cloves, whole, a teaspoonful of peppercorns and a few leaves of parsley or celery; lay the pork upon the vegetables, place the pan in a moderate oven and cook to a brown, when it may be seasoned with salt, pepper and pounded sage, and finish the cooking, allowing about fifteen minutes to each pound of the meat. One hour before the pork is done prepare the garnish as follows: Procure a dozen peeled white onions, break the layers apart and put them in a pan, with a teaspoonful each of sugar and butter, with a little salt and pepper, set the pan in the oven, occasionally shaking it, in order to move the onions about and insure their browning with uniformity; after the onions have been prepared wash four sour apples, quarter them and remove the cores, put them into a pan with barely enough water in to cover, and a tablespoonful of butter on each and bake them until they are tender, but do not allow them to become broken, and keep both the onions and apples hot, serving them with the pork. When the meat is done place it on a hot dish and arrange the onions and apples in little groups around it, and serve with a dish of plain-boiled potatoes with brown gravy. The gravy may be prepared by pouring out nearly all of the drippings from the pan in which the pork was cooked, leaving in the scraps of vegetables, set the pan over the fire and stir in a heaped tablespoonful of flour, cook it until brown and then add a pint of boiling water, gradually a little at a time, season the gravy with salt and pepper and again boil for a moment or two, strain and it is ready for serving with the pork.
A rib roast of pork on a bed of aromatics, with the pan drippings turned into gravy. The one thing to change is the timing: fifteen minutes to the pound was written for tougher, fattier pork and a trichinosis scare, and it will dry a modern loin out badly.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockFifteen minutes to the pound is a rough allowance in either direction. Roast to 145F at the thickest point away from the bone and rest before carving; for a 4-5 lb bone-in rack at 325-350F that usually works out around 18-20 minutes per pound, but the thermometer decides.
- A moderate oven350F. If you want the browning stage the recipe describes before seasoning, start at 425F for 20 minutes, then drop to 350F for the remainder.
- The chine boneCutting the backbone free from the rib ends is what makes the roast carvable into chops. A butcher will do it in a moment and tie the roast back up; ask for a bone-in loin rack, chine loosened.
- Scoring the skinPork sold in the US almost never comes with skin on. If you do get a skin-on roast, score through the rind but not into the meat, and dry it uncovered in the refrigerator overnight rather than only wiping it — surface moisture is what stops crackling.
- Whole spices in the panA dozen cloves and a teaspoon of peppercorns under the meat is a lot of assertive flavor for the drippings. It works because the gravy is strained; do not skip the straining.
- Sour applesThe recipe specifies only 'sour'; a Baldwin or Rhode Island Greening would have been among the likely candidates in Oscar's day. Granny Smith, Bramley or Northern Spy behave the same way — firm and tart enough to hold their quarters through baking. Sweet dessert apples are more likely to collapse into sauce.
- The onion garnishSeparating the layers of a dozen peeled white onions gives loose petals that brown and candy in the sugar and butter. Watch them in the last 20 minutes; the sugar takes them from browned to bitter quickly.
- The gravyPour off all but about two tablespoons of fat, leaving the vegetable scraps. A heaped tablespoon of flour to a pint of water gives a thin, old-style pan gravy; use two tablespoons of flour if you want it to coat the potatoes.
- YieldA 4-5 lb rack with the apples, onions and potatoes serves six to eight.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and published his Cook Book in 1896, some nine hundred pages that move between hotel-scale French cookery and plain American household dishes. This is squarely the second kind: roast pork with baked apples, browned onions and boiled potatoes is a New England and Middle Atlantic Sunday dinner, and the apple-with-pork pairing is older than the American kitchen — it turns up throughout northern European cooking, where the fruit's acidity cuts the fat. Late nineteenth-century American writers were emphatic that pork must be cooked hard and long, partly from a genuine fear of trichinosis and partly because the hogs of the period carried far more fat and connective tissue than today's lean bred-down loin. The scraped and scored skin, meanwhile, is a reminder that a butcher in 1896 sold the roast much closer to the whole animal than a supermarket case does now.