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Minced Pork
Chop up finely a couple of pounds of fresh lean pork, and break up half a pound of stale bread, soaking it till soft in three-quarters of a pint of milk; mix together the minced pork and soaked bread, with two well-beaten eggs, and season with pepper, salt and powdered sage; place this mixture in a buttered earthenware dish, place it in a moderate oven and bake for two hours, and serve hot with fried apples.
This is a baked pork loaf in all but name, and it behaves like one. The hinge is fat content: two pounds of genuinely lean pork bound with bread and milk will bake dry in two hours unless you either choose a fattier cut or cover the dish.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "moderate" is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. At that heat a loaf this size should be done well before two hours; check the centre at 60 to 75 minutes and pull it at 160F internal.
- The liquid measureThree-quarters of a pint by American measure is 12 fl oz, about 1 1/2 cups of milk. A British imperial pint would give 15 fl oz, a quarter more liquid and a distinctly wetter mixture.
- Half a pound of stale breadThat is roughly 4 to 5 cups of torn crumb from a dry white loaf, or between a third and a half of a standard sandwich loaf. Soft supermarket bread will collapse to paste in the milk; dry it in a low oven first if it is fresh.
- "Lean pork" is now leanerModern pork has been bred leaner than its nineteenth-century equivalent, and loin leaner still. Ask for coarsely ground shoulder, or grind your own with a visible proportion of fat, otherwise the loaf turns crumbly and grey.
- Seasoning quantitiesNone are given. For two pounds of meat, start with 2 teaspoons salt, a teaspoon of black pepper and 1 to 2 teaspoons dried sage; fry a spoonful of the mixture to taste before it goes in the dish.
- The dishA buttered earthenware dish of about 8 by 5 inches gives a loaf that holds its shape. Cover with foil or a lid for the first hour so the top does not case-harden, then uncover to brown.
- Fried applesFirm tart apples, cored and cut in thick rings, cooked in butter until they take colour and just yield. They are the acid that makes the dish work, not a garnish.
- YieldServes six generously, and it slices better cold the next day than hot from the oven.
Minced pork baked with soaked bread, eggs and sage sits squarely in the northern European tradition of forcemeat loaves and stuffings — the same seasoning logic as English sage-and-onion stuffing, applied to the meat itself rather than packed inside a bird. Oscar Tschirky's book collects both the Waldorf's grand restaurant cookery and a great many plain household dishes like this one, which tells you something about how the volume was meant to be used. Pork with sage and with apples are both very old pairings, generally explained by the fat of the meat wanting an aromatic herb and a sharp fruit against it, and by the fact that apples and slaughtered pigs both arrive in autumn. Serving fried apples alongside, rather than as a sauce, has a long history in German and other northern European cooking, and was familiar too from Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic tables.