Roast Pork
Wipe pork, sprinkle with salt and pepper, place on rack in dripping pan or roaster, and dredge meat and bottom of pan with flour. Place in moderate oven and roast three or four hours, basting every fifteen minutes with fat in pan. For roast pork, the usual rule is twenty-five minutes to the pound. Make gravy, using same proportions as White Sauce I. (see page 29), substituting water for milk.
A bare-bones roasting method from an era when pork was cooked until every trace of pink was gone. The technique still works; the timing does not.
- Moderate ovenThe book gives no temperature. "Moderate" is usually read as about 350F, though period sources put the range at roughly 350-375F. Nothing in the recipe indicates a hot start or any change of heat.
- Twenty-five minutes to the poundThis drives the internal temperature well past the point of dryness and produces fibrous meat. Current practice for whole cuts is 145F on an instant-read thermometer followed by a three-minute rest; time per pound varies with the size and shape of the joint, so treat any per-pound figure as a rough guide only. Ground pork and rolled or stuffed roasts still go to 160F.
- Three or four hoursThat span tells you the cut assumed here is large — a fresh ham or a bone-in loin end of 7 to 10 lb, not a modern 3 lb supermarket loin. Scale your expectations to the joint in front of you and use the thermometer, not the clock.
- Dredging with flourFlouring the meat and the pan bottom is doing two jobs: it browns into a crust on the roast and it toasts in the drippings so the gravy has body and color from the start. Do not skip the pan-bottom dredge if you intend to make the gravy as written.
- Basting every fifteen minutesModern pork is bred far leaner than 1900s pork, so there is less rendered fat in the pan to work with, and every oven opening costs heat. Baste three or four times over the roast, or not at all if the joint has a fat cap scored and left facing up.
- White Sauce I proportionsThe recipe sends you to page 29 for the exact amounts. Thin white sauce of this period is typically about 1 tablespoon fat, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup liquid, seasoned with salt and pepper; check the book's own figures before scaling. Here the fat is the pork drippings and the liquid is water, as the recipe directs; whisk in gradually and simmer a few minutes to cook out the flour.
- Rack and panA dripping pan is a shallow roasting pan. Keeping the joint on a rack lets the underside brown rather than stew in the fat, which matters more with a long roast.
- YieldFigure about 1/2 lb of bone-in roast or 1/3 lb boneless per person; a 7 lb joint serves 10 to 12 with leftovers.
The twenty-five-minutes-to-the-pound rule is often read less as culinary conservatism than as public health policy in recipe form, though the connection is more plausible inference than documented intent. Trichinosis from undercooked pork was a genuine and well-publicized hazard in late nineteenth-century America, and cookbooks of the period answered it with brute duration — cook it long enough and nothing survives. Modern pork production, freezing practices, and inspection have made trichinella vanishingly rare in commercial pork, which is why the recommended safe temperature for whole cuts was lowered to 145F in 2011. The Metropolitan Cook Book itself belongs to a genre of free or near-free promotional cookbooks distributed by insurance companies to policyholders, and its instructions are terse, assuming the reader already knows what a dripping pan is and can turn to page 29 without being told twice.