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Forcemeat for Roasted Suckling Pig
Parboil one or two small onions, chop them very fine, and add half an ounce of powdered sage, six ounces of sifted breadcrumbs and four ounces of butter; season with cayenne, salt and pepper, and add one egg to bind it into a mass. It will then be ready for use. If preferred, the onion may be left out of the stuffing altogether.
A plain English sage-and-onion stuffing, given in ounces as a professional kitchen would have weighed it. Two things need attention: the sage is a much heavier hand than modern palates expect, and the quantity is small for the animal named.
- Weights in cupsSix ounces of sifted breadcrumbs is roughly 1 1/2 cups of fine dry crumbs, or about 4 cups if you use fresh soft crumbs. Four ounces of butter is one stick.
- The sage is the hingeHalf an ounce of powdered sage is somewhere around 6 tablespoons of ground dried sage, depending on the grind — an assertive amount by current standards. Start with 1 to 2 tablespoons, taste a spoonful of the mixture fried in butter, and build from there.
- YieldThis makes roughly 2 cups of stuffing, enough for a very small pig or for a loin or shoulder roast. A 15 to 20 lb suckling pig will take several times the quantity; scale the whole list together.
- Parboil means softenFive minutes in simmering water takes the raw bite off the onion so it does not stay crunchy inside a cavity where it gets little direct heat. Sweating the chopped onion in some of the butter does the same job with more flavor.
- Butter textureWork the butter in soft, not melted. Melted butter soaks into the crumbs and the stuffing bakes dense; softened butter rubbed through keeps it loose.
- Cook it throughThe egg is raw and the stuffing sits in the coolest part of the roast. Take the center of the stuffing to 165F on a thermometer, not just the meat, or bake it separately in a buttered dish at 350F for about 40 minutes.
- CayenneOscar gives no quantity. A scant 1/4 teaspoon for this batch is enough to be felt against the sage without reading as heat.
Sage and onion with breadcrumbs is the standard English stuffing for pork and goose, recorded in household cookery well before Oscar Tschirky was writing, and it appears here because roast suckling pig was still a set piece of American hotel banqueting in the 1890s — carried whole to the table, apple or lemon in the mouth, and carved in the room. The pairing of sage with pork is usually explained on practical grounds: the herb's resinous bitterness cuts fat, and it holds up to long roasting when gentler herbs fade. Oscar closes by allowing the onion to be left out; the crumb-butter-sage base works without it.