Stuffed Pork
Remove the piece of bone (in the leg take out the upper portion) and fill with stuffing made as follows: Half pound of boiled onion chopped fine, three ounces of bread crumbs, seasoning of pepper, salt and sage. Sew up the opening and roast, allowing twenty minutes to each pound of meat; serve with good gravy and apple sauce.
A boned leg or loin of pork with the classic English sage-and-onion filling. The original assumes a butcher has done the boning and that the cook already knows her oven, so the two things worth pinning down are temperature and doneness.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A stuffed roast of this size wants a steady 325-350F; higher and the outside dries long before the centre of the stuffing is hot.
- Twenty minutes to the poundA long time by modern standards, from a period when pork was routinely cooked well done. Cook to temperature instead of the clock: 145F in the meat with a 3-minute rest for loin and leg; if you substitute a shoulder and want it to pull apart, 190-200F.
- Stuffing must reach temperature tooBecause the filling sits in the cavity, check it separately. It should register 165F, and since that is higher than the meat's own target the stuffing is usually the limiting factor.
- Half a pound of boiled onionRoughly two medium onions, simmered until soft and then chopped, not chopped raw. Boiling first drives off the harshness and stops the stuffing weeping.
- Three ounces of bread crumbsAbout 3/4 cup of dry crumbs, or roughly 1 1/2 cups if fresh and soft. Fresh crumbs from a day-old loaf give a softer result; packaged fine crumbs make it dense.
- SageThe quantity is left to taste. Start with 1 to 2 teaspoons dried rubbed sage or a tablespoon of chopped fresh, and remember dried sage strengthens as it cooks.
- Sewing upButcher's twine and a trussing needle, or simply tie the roast at intervals if the pocket can be closed by rolling. The point is to keep the stuffing from spilling into the pan and burning.
- YieldA boned leg runs 6-10 lb and will serve ten to sixteen; a boned loin of 4 lb serves six to eight. Rest the meat 15-20 minutes before carving.
Sage and onion is the standard English stuffing for pork and goose, and it appears in printed cookery from the eighteenth century onward with almost the same proportions given here: boiled onion, breadcrumbs, sage, pepper and salt. The pairing with apple sauce is equally old and equally practical, since a sharp fruit sauce cuts the fat of a rich roast; the same logic puts gooseberry with mackerel and redcurrant with mutton. What dates this version is the instruction to bone the joint yourself and the flat twenty-minutes-to-the-pound rule, both signs of a period when meat came from a butcher who broke down whole carcasses and when a meat thermometer was far from a standard piece of kitchen equipment. The generous roasting time reflects genuine caution about undercooked pork.