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Roasted Marinaded Pork
Trim well all the skin from a piece of pork, rub it thoroughly with salt, place in a deep dish with a few sliced onions, sage leaves, thyme, basil, a few juniper berries and cloves, dusting it over with plenty of pepper; baste the meat with four or five tablespoonfuls of vinegar, and let it stand for a few days; basting and turning it two or three times a day, then put it together with the other ingredients in a baking dish, place it in the oven, and bake it until half cooked, take the dish out of the oven, pour in boiling water, and stir it thoroughly; strain the gravy through a fine hair sieve, return it to the oven, and finish cooking it, basting the meat well while baking. Put the meat on a hot dish, skim off the fat from the sauce and strain it through a fine hair sieve. Pour it over the meat, and serve.
Oscar gives no cut, no oven temperature and no times, which is typical of a book written for cooks who already knew both. The bones of the method are sound; what needs attention is where the meat sits during those few days and how the pan juices are handled.
- Marinate cold, not on the counterFour or five tablespoons of vinegar and a rub of salt will not preserve a whole roast at room temperature for several days. Marinate covered in the refrigerator, and treat two to three days as the outside limit.
- The cut"A piece of pork" with skin to trim suggests a fresh (uncured) ham, shoulder or loin roast; these notes assume roughly 4-5 lb. Shoulder rewards the long aromatic soak best; loin dries out and wants the shorter end of the marinating time.
- Oven temperatureNo number is given; the book assumes a cook who could judge her own range. Roast at 325-350F throughout. Loin is done at 145F internal with a rest; shoulder needs to run up to 190-195F to become tender.
- The hinge: the mid-roast deglazeHalf-way through, the pan holds caramelized onion, spice and rendered fat that can scorch and turn the gravy bitter over the rest of the roast. Pouring in boiling water, stirring and straining out the solids appears to be the point of the step; do not skip it, and use boiling rather than cold water, which will seize the fat.
- Hair sieveA horsehair-mesh strainer. A fine chinois or a conical strainer lined with a double layer of cheesecloth does the same job.
- Juniper berriesSold whole in the spice aisle; crush them lightly with the flat of a knife to release the resin. Six to eight is plenty for a 4-5 lb roast, along with four or five cloves, which are assertive.
- Salt and pepper"Rub it thoroughly with salt" gives no quantity. A scant teaspoon of kosher salt per pound is closer to modern palates, and the marinade will carry it inward.
- Finishing the sauceThe gravy is thin by design, not a flour-thickened pan sauce. Skim hard, strain again, and if it seems weak reduce it briefly on the stovetop before pouring it over the sliced meat.
- YieldA 4-5 lb roast serves six to eight. It slices better after 15-20 minutes' rest, so hold the sauce hot and pour it at the table.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name fronted this 1896 book, was never technically the Waldorf's chef, but the recipes he collected reflect the hotel's European kitchen brigade and his own Continental training. A pork roast steeped for days in vinegar, onion, juniper and clove is essentially the sauerbraten treatment applied to pork rather than beef, a Germanic and Alsatian habit that is generally assumed to have reached American hotel kitchens with the cooks who worked in them. The marinade is often said to have begun as preservation as much as flavoring: before reliable refrigeration, acid and salt were thought to buy a butchered animal a few extra days, with the aromatics covering whatever the days did to it. By Oscar's time that function would presumably have been largely obsolete, and what survived was the taste, which is why the method reads here as a recipe for flavor rather than a necessity.