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Roast Spare-Rib
Trim off the rough ends neatly, crack the ribs across the middle, rub with salt and sprinkle with pepper, fold over, stuff with turkeydressing, sew up tightly, place in dripping-pan with pint of water, baste frequently, turning over once so as to bake both sides equally until a rich brown..
A whole side of spare-ribs, cracked so it folds like a book around bread stuffing. The original assumes you know how a pork roast behaves; here is what it leaves out.
- The hinge: crack, don't cutCracking the ribs across the middle means severing the bones but leaving the meat and membrane intact, so the slab folds without falling into two pieces. A heavy cleaver or a butcher's saw does it; ask a butcher to crack a full rack across if you would rather not. Cut all the way through and there is nothing to sew.
- Turkey dressingIn this period that generally means a plain bread stuffing: stale bread, butter or salt pork, onion, and sage or summer savory, sometimes bound with egg. The book's own dressing recipe is not reproduced here, so use any bread stuffing you would put in poultry. Roughly 3 to 4 cups will fill a full rack.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the recipe predates oven thermostats. Roast at 325 to 350F. Higher and the exposed stuffing dries and the thin rib ends burn before the meat is tender.
- Stuffing temperature is the limitThe stuffing sits in the coolest part of the roast and picks up raw pork juices, so it must reach 165F on a thermometer. Spare-ribs themselves are best well past the 145F minimum — around 190F, when the connective tissue has given way. In practice the meat gets there first, so check both.
- TimingFigure 2 to 2 1/2 hours for a stuffed rack of 3 to 4 lb, then judge by thermometer rather than clock. Loosely tent with foil if the top browns before the inside is done.
- The pint of waterWater in the dripping-pan keeps the fat and sugars from scorching and gives you something to baste with. Replenish it if it cooks away; a dry pan will smoke and the drippings will be bitter.
- Turning it overFlipping a sewn, stuffed slab once is awkward and lets stuffing escape. If you would rather not, leave it seam-side down and rely on basting for colour; in a modern oven the even heat makes the turn less necessary than it was in a wood range.
- Sewing upUse cotton butcher's twine and a trussing needle, and stitch at intervals of about an inch. Snip the thread out before carving, cutting between the bones into single or double ribs.
- YieldA full rack stuffed this way serves 4 to 6, depending on how meaty the ribs are. Nineteenth-century hogs were generally lard-type breeds and fatter than modern lean pork, so a modern rack may benefit from a spoonful of the pan liquid over each portion.
Roasting a whole spare-rib was a fixture of the American hog-killing season, when a family butchered in cold weather and worked through the fresh cuts before curing the hams and sides. Ribs were usually among the cuts eaten fresh rather than put down in salt, which is largely why they appear in cookbooks of the period as a roast rather than a barbecue. Folding a cracked rack around stuffing borrows a technique from poultry, and the reference to "turkey dressing" suggests the book expected its reader to find that recipe elsewhere in the same volume. The cut is bone and thin muscle with little to insulate it, and the stuffing helps: it fills the cavity, absorbs the drippings, and stretches a modest amount of meat across more plates.