Roast Pork
To roast fresh pork season like veal, with salt, sugar and pepper; a little powdered sage may also be added, if liked. Roast the same as veal and baste every fifteen minutes after the pork has begun to brown, with hot water seasoned with salt and pepper. Pork requires very thorough cooking to render it wholesome or palatable, and should be roasted a greater length of time even than veal.
This is less a recipe than a method note, written for a cook who already knows how the book roasts veal. The gaps it leaves — temperature, time, cut — are the ones worth filling.
- Read it against the veal entryThe recipe gives no temperature at all, only "roast the same as veal." For a modern oven, a hot start of about 450F for the first 20 minutes to brown the surface, then 325-350F for the remainder, will serve.
- Time and donenessWhole cuts of pork — loin, shoulder, fresh leg — are done at 145F on an instant-read thermometer with a 3-minute rest, which gives faintly pink, juicy meat. A shoulder taken further, to 190-200F, becomes shreddable; that is a different dish, not undercooked or overcooked.
- Why the original insists on long cookingThe warning about "wholesome" pork reflects period anxiety about Trichinella, then a genuine risk in scrap-fed hogs, along with a more general distrust of pork's digestibility. Trichinella is now rare in commercial pork in North America and Europe, and recommended internal temperatures have fallen accordingly, from the high figures of the old cookbooks to 145F today.
- Basting with waterThis book has you baste with salted hot water rather than fat, reasonable enough for a joint that renders its own drippings. It also softens the crackling, so skip it if you want crisp skin -- dry the rind, salt it, and leave it alone.
- The seasoning"Season like veal" here is salt, a little sugar and pepper rubbed on before roasting. The sugar is there for browning as much as sweetness; a scant teaspoon for a 4 lb roast is plenty.
- Powdered sageDried rubbed sage is stronger than the fresh leaf. About a teaspoon for a 4-5 lb loin; more turns dusty and slightly bitter.
- YieldFigure 3/4 lb bone-in or 1/2 lb boneless per person. A 4 lb loin serves six with leftovers for cold slicing.
Fresh pork was seasonal eating in the nineteenth-century household: pigs were killed in cold weather, and the fresh joints had to be used quickly while the rest of the animal went into brine, the smokehouse or the lard pot. The insistence on very thorough cooking reflects genuine anxiety of the period about trichinosis, which was identified in the mid-1800s and firmly linked to undercooked pork by the 1860s; American cookbooks carried the warning for the better part of a century afterward. Sage as the companion herb to pork is older still and is generally traced to English cookery, where it flavored both the roast and its stuffing long before this book was compiled.