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Baked Suckling Pig
Choose a small, plump pig. Use the liver, heart and lights for the dressing, after first putting them over the fire in salted boiling water, and boiling them until tender, or mincing after browning them in butter. Peel and grate an onion, put it over the fire in a fryingpan with two tablespoonfuls of butter, and fry it slowly; mince the heart, liver and kidneys, add them to the onion; soak two breakfast cupfuls of bread in cold water until soft, then squeeze it in a towel to extract the water, and put it with the minced mixture and onions; season the mixture highly with salt, pepper, ground sage, and marjoram, and stir it till it is scalding hot. Use this stuffing for the pig, sewing it up; truss it so as to keep the legs in place, put it into a dripping pan just large enough to hold it, and bake it in a moderate oven. For the first hour baste it with butter and water, after that with butter alone. If the ears and tail seem in danger of browning, wrap them in buttered paper, season it two or three times with salt and pepper while it is being basted, A medium-sized pig will take from two to two and one-half hours to bake. When the pig is done put it on a dish to keep hot after removing the stitches which retain the stuffing, and garnish with brussel sprouts and potato croquettes. Place the dripping-pan over the fire, stir in one tablespoonful of flour, and brown it; then add equal quantities of boiling water or wine, or three parts of water and one of mushroom or walnut catsup. Let the gravy thus made boil once, season it with salt and pepper, and then serve it with the baked pig. The stuffing may be varied by using mashed potatoes instead of the soaked bread. Apple sauce is the usual accompaniment. Cold-slaw and cranberry jelly or stewed cranberries are used in America with roasted or baked suckling pig. Prepare the apple sauce as follows: Peel, quarter, and core some tart apples, stew them to a pulp over a slow fire, adding at first three tablespoonfuls of water to one pint of apples to prevent their burning; when the apples are stewed to a pulp, stir with them a tablespoonful of butter to each pint of the sauce, and then use it either hot or cold.
A full-dress banquet roast from the Waldorf's kitchen, written when a whole suckling pig was a standard holiday centrepiece. Most of the work is sourcing and oven space; the cooking itself is straightforward.
- The hinge: temperature, not the clockTwo to two and a half hours holds only for a genuinely small pig, and the recipe gives no weight. Cook to an instant-read thermometer: 160F deep in the shoulder and hind leg, away from bone. A 15-20 lb pig will typically want three to four hours at 350F.
- "A moderate oven"350F. The pig should be started in a pan just large enough to hold it, as directed, so the drippings pool rather than scorch across an empty pan.
- LightsLungs. They cannot legally be sold for food in the United States and are not available from a domestic butcher. Use liver and heart alone, or add kidneys, which the recipe itself calls for further down without ever listing them.
- Breakfast cupfulA large cup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two of them soaked and squeezed gives roughly 2 cups of wet bread — enough for a small pig, so scale up with the animal rather than treating it as fixed.
- Sourcing the pigOrder from a whole-animal butcher or a Latin or Asian market, usually a week or more ahead. Ask for it dressed, with the head on. Measure your oven first: a 20 lb pig laid out on a rack in a pan can run to two feet or more, which many home ovens will not take.
- Basting and the skinContinuous buttering keeps the meat moist but softens the skin. If you want crackling, stop basting for the last 30 to 40 minutes, wipe the skin dry, and raise the heat to 425F to blister it.
- Buttered paperParchment works; foil is easier. Cover ears, tail and snout as soon as they colour, which happens well before the shoulders are done.
- Walnut and mushroom catsupThin, dark, salty condiments of the older, non-tomato ketchup family. Mushroom ketchup is still sold; for walnut, a spoonful of Worcestershire plus a splash of the pan wine gets close enough for a gravy.
- YieldA dressed suckling pig gives less meat than its size suggests — figure about 1 lb of pig per person. A 20 lb animal serves roughly 15 to 20 with the sprouts, croquettes, apple sauce and cranberries the recipe lines up beside it.
Suckling pig was a display dish long before Oscar Tschirky put it on Waldorf menus, and the assembly here — head on, stuffing sewn in, ears shielded with paper, sauce built in the dripping pan — descends from English roasting practice of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where a small pig was spitted whole and served with apple sauce. What marks the entry as American and as of its moment is the last sentence: cole slaw and cranberries, "used in America," grafted onto an English roast, and the offal dressing offered with mashed potato as an alternative to soaked bread. Cooking the pluck (liver, heart, lungs) into the stuffing used up parts of an animal that arrived whole from the butcher.