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To Barbacue a Leg of Pork

A roasted leg of pork served with a sauce of wine, anchovies, egg yolks, butter, lemon, and herbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 13,933 recipes. Both carry 2-furfurylthiol, which smells coffee, roasted. The science ↓

To Barbacue a Leg of Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the pork

  1. Roast the leg of pork before a good fire.

  2. In the dripping pan, add two bottles of red wine and baste the pork with it while roasting.

Make the sauce

  1. Once cooked, take the remaining liquid from the pan.

  2. Add two anchovies, the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs (finely pounded), ¼ pound of butter, and the juice of ½ lemon to the pan.

  3. Include a bunch of sweet herbs and 1 teaspoon of lemon juice.

  4. Mix well and serve with the pork.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  2. Red wine + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,599 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Butter + lemontop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,227 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  4. Egg + buttertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together118,967 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  5. Pork + red winetop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together680 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Red wine
Bastes the pork and forms the liquid base that becomes the sauce.
Hard-boiled egg yolks
Finely pounded yolks thicken and enrich the sauce, adding body.
Butter
Adds fat, richness and a smooth, glossy texture to the sauce.
Anchovies
Adds savoury depth to the sauce, which mellows during cooking.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich butter and yolk sauce.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, red wine, egg, butter):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Plumfits better
  3. Pearfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, red wine, egg, butter. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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