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Roast Leg of Young Pork
To roast a leg of young pork remove the bone, fill the cavity with highly seasoned bread crumbs, a little powdered sage, and roast as directed for pork.
A fresh (uncured) pork leg, boned and filled with a sage-scented crumb stuffing. The original leans on a cross-reference — "roast as directed for pork" — so the working numbers have to be supplied.
- What cut to buy"Leg of young pork" is a fresh ham, sold whole at 12-18 lb or split into shank and sirloin halves. Ask the butcher to bone it and leave the skin on; a 6-8 lb boned half is the practical size for a home oven.
- Oven and timingStart at 425F for 20-30 minutes to set the skin, then drop to 325-350F. Figure roughly 20-25 minutes per pound at the lower temperature, but go by temperature rather than the clock.
- The hinge: two temperatures, not oneModern pork is safe at 145F with a three-minute rest, but bread stuffing inside the cavity must reach 165F. Those two numbers do not arrive together in a boned, rolled leg. Roast the stuffing in a separate dish if you want the meat at 145F; if you stuff the cavity, expect to take the whole roast to 165F and accept firmer, drier meat.
- "Highly seasoned bread crumbs"In period recipes this usually means soft crumbs from a stale loaf rather than dry commercial crumbs, and such stuffings were commonly bound with butter and egg and seasoned assertively with onion, salt and black pepper. Working from that, for a boned half leg: about 4 cups of crumbs, 1 small chopped onion cooked in 4 tablespoons butter, 1 egg, and 1 to 2 teaspoons dried sage.
- Powdered sageStart with a teaspoon and taste the stuffing mixture after cooking a spoonful in a pan; sage turns bitter in quantity.
- Tying and roastingRoll and tie at 1-inch intervals so the stuffing stays put, and set the roast on a rack over a shallow pan. Score the skin in a diamond pattern before it goes in if you want crackling.
- RestingRest 20-30 minutes under loose foil before carving. A stuffed rolled roast this size loses a great deal of juice if cut straight from the oven.
- YieldA boned 7 lb half leg with stuffing serves 10-12, with leftovers that slice well cold.
Fresh pork leg was the less common fate of the joint in the nineteenth century — legs were commonly put into brine or the smokehouse to become ham, which kept through the year, while roast fresh pork was a seasonal treat tied to autumn slaughtering, when there was no way to store the meat anyway. The sage-and-crumb filling is inherited straight from English practice, where sage is the near-invariable partner to pork and is often said to have been chosen for its supposed help with a rich, fatty meat. The brevity here is characteristic of compilations of this kind: the roasting method was given once under a general heading, and every variation afterward simply pointed back to it.