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Roasted Saddle of Pork
Select a good saddle of pork, remove the fat and skin, and cover it with a well buttered sheet of paper, and roast it in a hot oven until done, allowing about twenty minutes to each pound of meat. Baste constantly, and when cooked put it on a dish and serve with a little brown gravy poured over, and a little Robert sauce or tomato sauce in a sauceboat.
A plain roast whose only real problem is the timing: twenty minutes to the pound in a hot oven belongs to an era when pork was cooked to destruction. Everything else translates directly.
- What a saddle isThe saddle is the whole unsplit loin, both sides still joined at the backbone, taken from behind the shoulder to the hip. Almost no retail butcher cuts it that way now; order it ahead, or use a bone-in center-cut loin roast and treat one side as half a saddle.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; a "hot" oven of this period is conventionally read as roughly 425–450F. Start there for 20–25 minutes to color the surface, then drop to 325–350F for the remainder, or the outer inch will be dry long before the center is warm.
- The timing is the thingTwenty minutes per pound will take a loin well past 180F. Cook to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest part, away from bone, and rest 15 minutes. On a 5–6 lb bone-in loin that is usually well under two hours total.
- Buttered paperA buttered sheet of parchment laid over the meat is still the best version of this; it shields the surface while letting steam escape, which foil does not. Remove it for the last 20 minutes if you want more color.
- Removing fat and skinOscar strips the skin because the roast is being basted and sauced rather than crackled. If you would rather have crackling, leave the rind on, score it, and skip the paper entirely — the two approaches do not combine.
- BastingConstant basting was necessary over an unreliable coal range; in a modern convection oven it mostly cools the surface each time the door opens. Baste three or four times and leave it alone otherwise.
- Sauce RobertA brown sauce finished with onion, white wine or vinegar, and mustard — one of the old French mother-sauce derivatives, and the traditional partner to pork. Prepared versions exist; the tomato sauce alternative here is a plain cooked tomato sauce, not a pasta sauce.
- YieldA whole saddle is a banquet cut and will serve 10–14. A single bone-in loin roast of 5 lb serves 6 to 8.
The saddle — selle in French kitchens — was a presentation cut, carved at the table or on a sideboard, and it appears in Oscar Tschirky's book because the Waldorf's dining rooms in the 1890s ran on that kind of theater. The insistence on twenty minutes to the pound reflects a genuine anxiety of the period: trichinosis was a recognized hazard of American pork, and cookbooks of the era routinely pushed pork far past the point of palatability as insurance. Modern grain-fed pork raised indoors carries a negligible risk of trichinella, which is why the USDA lowered its recommendation for whole cuts to 145F with a rest in 2011. Sauce Robert, named for a cook mentioned as early as the sixteenth century in French sources though the attribution is traditional rather than documented, had by Oscar's day settled into a standard mustard-and-onion brown sauce and was considered the automatic accompaniment to roast pork.