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Roast Pig

A whole pig stuffed with sweet potatoes and bacon, roasted with salt, pepper, and water, served hot with gravy or cold with horseradish.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 34,122 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pig

  1. Stuff the pig with cooked sweet potatoes mixed with chopped bacon, salt, and pepper.

  2. Scald the inside of the pig, rub with salt and pepper, fill, and sew it up.

  3. Bend the forelegs under the body and the hind legs forward, then skewer to hold in place.

  4. Keep the mouth open with a corn cob or piece of wood while cooking.

Roast

  1. Place the pig in a large baking pan and pour over 1 quart of boiling water.

  2. Baste often until the pig is a fine brown.

Garnish and serve

  1. Garnish a large dish with curled parsley, sift powdered crackers over the pig, and place it kneeling in the center.

  2. Insert a red apple in the mouth.

  3. For serving hot, serve with gravy; for cold, serve with grated horseradish on the side.

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. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Sweet potato + corntop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together153 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

  3. Sweet potato + parsleytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together180 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  4. Pepper + corntop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  5. Sweet potato + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,015 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Young pig
Forms the whole dish; its skin browns during roasting while the meat cooks through.
Sweet potatoes
Fill the cavity and add moisture and starch that soak up the drippings as the pig roasts.
Bacon
Adds fat and savory flavor that bastes the stuffing and carries into the sweet potatoes.
Boiling water
Creates steam in the pan, adding moisture and helping keep the meat from drying out early.

The step that matters

Baste often until the pig is a fine brown. Frequent basting spreads fat and drippings over the skin, which helps it brown evenly and stay moist. Skipping it can leave the skin pale and dry.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sweet potato, pepper, parsley, corn):

  1. Limefits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Avocadofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sweet potato, pepper, parsley, corn. 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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