Skip to main content
Main

Leg of Pork Roasted

Roasted leg of pork seasoned with sage, pepper, salt, bread crumbs, and onion, served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Leg of Pork Roasted

Oven, in the book's wordsA hot oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Parboil the leg of pork and remove the skin.

  2. Dust the meat with flour and baste with butter.

Roast and serve

  1. Mix sage, ground black pepper, coarse sea salt, and bread crumbs with finely minced onion.

  2. Sprinkle the mixture on the meat when it is almost done.

  3. Serve with ½ pint of gravy in the dish.

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. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  5. Pork + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,527 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork leg
Forms the main body of the roast, providing the bulk of the dish.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping the surface brown and taste rich.
Flour
Dusted on the meat to help create a dry surface that browns.
Bread crumbs
Form the crust layer with the seasonings, adding texture to the outside.
Onion
Adds aroma and savory flavour to the crumb coating.

The step that matters

Sprinkling the crumb mixture when almost done. Adding the bread crumb coating too early lets it burn before the meat is cooked through. Adding it near the end lets it toast into a crisp crust while the interior finishes cooking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, flour, sage, pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, flour, sage, pepper, bread. 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.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes