Roast Pig
Have your butcher select for you a white and fair, a month old pig, if it be well grown and plump, is best for this purpose; wash thoroughly with soda and water, next with salt and water. Rinse with pure cold water and wipe dry inside; then wrap in a wet cloth, and keep this saturated with cold water until you are ready to stuff it.
What the book prints here is only the first stage: buying, cleaning and holding the pig until stuffing. The roasting and stuffing were expected to follow from a companion entry or from the cook's own judgment.
- What "a month old pig" meansThis is a suckling pig, dressed weight roughly 15-20 lb. Order it from a butcher who handles whole animals, and expect several days' notice; ask that it be scalded, scraped and drawn, with the head left on.
- "Soda"Washing soda (sodium carbonate) or baking soda, used as a mild degreaser on skin that had just been scalded and scraped. It is not needed now. Rinse under cold running water, rub with salt if you like, rinse again and dry.
- The wet clothMost likely a pre-refrigeration holding measure: a damp cloth would keep the carcass cool by evaporation and stop the skin drying out. Refrigerate instead, on a tray, uncovered so the skin dries. Do not wrap a whole pig in damp cloth at room temperature for any length of time.
- Dry skin is the hingeEverything about the finish depends on the skin being bone dry when it meets heat. Leave it uncovered in the refrigerator overnight rather than following the wet-cloth instruction, or the crackling will steam instead of blistering.
- Fitting the ovenA 15-20 lb pig needs a full-size roasting pan and a home oven with the racks out; measure the diagonal before you order. Many cooks truss the legs forward and back to shorten the animal, and shield the ears and tail with foil.
- Heat and donenessModern practice is a moderate oven, about 325-350F, until the thickest part of the shoulder reads 160F, then a short blast at 450F to crisp the skin. Reckon on several hours, but go by the thermometer rather than the clock.
- YieldA pig of this size will serve roughly 10-15 people depending on how much meat it carries, and it carves best after 30 minutes' rest.
- The missing halfSince the book stops before the stuffing and the roasting, take those steps from a current whole-pig recipe rather than improvising quantities for a bread or sage dressing at this scale.
Suckling pig was the show-piece roast of the Anglo-American festive table long before it was a novelty, valued because the flesh of an unweaned animal is pale and mild and the skin, being thin, crackles rather than merely browning. Charles Lamb's A Dissertation upon Roast Pig (1822) had already made it a literary set-piece by the time books like this one were written, and nineteenth-century American cookery collections often carry an entry for it in the meats chapter, sometimes with an apple or lemon in the mouth at table. The instruction to wash with soda and then salt suggests a period when the butcher's scalding and scraping may well have left bristles and grime the cook was expected to finish off herself, and the wet cloth kept over the carcass is a reminder that a whole animal had to be held for a day or more in a house with no mechanical cold.