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Roasted Sucking Pig

A roasted pig stuffed with a mixture of lights, liver, sausage meat, sage, mushrooms, chestnuts, or truffles, basted with salted water and oil.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and chestnut match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 102 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Roasted Sucking Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Scald and truss the pig well.

  2. Prepare the stuffing with lights, liver, sausage meat, and season with sage, mushrooms, chestnuts, or truffles.

  3. Fill the pig with the stuffing.

  4. Place the pig on a spit.

Roast and baste

  1. Baste with salted and spiced water five to six times.

  2. Baste with oil using a bunch of sage on a stick.

  3. Cook for 2 to 2.5 hours until done.

Serve

  1. Serve hot from the spit.

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 + chestnuttop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together102 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Mushroom + truffletop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,900 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

  3. Mushroom + chestnuttop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together474 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  4. Liver + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together229 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1,8-cineol (eucalyptus, camphor).

  5. Liver + truffletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together395 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-nonanal (fatty, waxy).

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

What each ingredient does

Sucking pig
Forms the main body of the dish, with its meat cooking slowly over the spit.
Stuffing meats
Add richness and moisture to the inside of the pig as they cook.
Chestnuts
Add starchy body and a mild sweetness to the stuffing.
Mushrooms
Add savoury, earthy moisture to the stuffing.
Oil
Helps the outside brown and crisp as it is basted.

The step that matters

Basting with salted and spiced water five to six times. Repeated basting keeps the surface moist during long roasting, while the salt seasons the skin and meat. Too little basting can leave the outside dry before the centre is cooked.

Swap the sage

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (liver, mushroom, chestnut, truffle):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Sagethe original
  3. Garlicfits about as well
  4. Marjoramfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against liver, mushroom, chestnut, truffle. 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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