Home › Breakfast Dishes › Pork Balls
Pork Balls
Chop raw fresh pork very fine, add a little salt, plenty pepper and a very small onion chopped fine; half as much bread soaked as there is meat, two eggs. Mix well together. Make in oblong patties and fry like oysters.
A panade-bound pork patty from the breakfast chapter, written for a cook who already knew how fried oysters were handled. The instructions leave two things unstated: what the bread is soaked in, and what "fry like oysters" involves.
- Fry like oystersIn this period the usual handling was to dip the shaped patty in beaten egg, roll it in cracker crumbs or fine breadcrumbs, and fry in a shallow depth of hot fat until browned on both sides; plainer frying without a coating is also found, so the crumb treatment is likely rather than certain. The recipe's two eggs go into the mix, so a further egg would be needed for coating.
- The breadStale white bread, crusts off, soaked in milk or water and squeezed nearly dry — a panade. The recipe does not say whether "half as much bread as meat" is meant by bulk or by weight; read as bulk, roughly 2 to 3 slices soaked and wrung out per 1 lb of pork gives a workable texture. More than that and the balls taste of bread.
- The pork"Chopped very fine" is roughly what a grinder plate gives today. Use shoulder rather than loin: something in the region of 20 to 25 percent fat, or the patties dry out. Plain ground pork from the supermarket works and needs no further chopping.
- Cook them throughThis is raw ground pork, so the interior must reach 160F. Patties around three-quarters of an inch thick, in fat over moderate heat, take roughly 4 to 5 minutes a side. Browning fast in very hot fat can leave the centre pink.
- Seasoning"A little salt, plenty pepper" reads as roughly 1 teaspoon salt and a generous half-teaspoon or more of black pepper per pound. Fry a small test piece and taste before shaping the rest — the only reliable way with a raw forcemeat.
- YieldA pound of pork with its bread and eggs makes eight to ten oblong patties, enough for four at breakfast.
Breakfast in many American households of this period was a hot meat meal, and cookbooks of the era give considerable space to what could be made quickly from raw or leftover meat before the rest of the day's cooking began. This is essentially a fresh sausage without a casing: the same pork, pepper and onion that would go into links, stretched with a soaked-bread panade to make the meat go further and keep it tender. The direction to "fry like oysters" assumes the reader knows the fried-oyster method — fried oysters were a fixture of the American table, cheap along the coasts and shipped inland in barrels and cans, and their egg-and-crumb treatment was widely applied to croquettes, cutlets and patties. The shorthand tells you as much about the book's expected reader as the recipe does about the dish.