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A Chine or Spare Rib of Pork

Roasted pork rib or chine, seasoned with salt and flour, cooked until tender and served with a gravy made from the drippings.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 27% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,187 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

A Chine or Spare Rib of Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Trim off all unnecessary fat from the pork.

  2. Salt the pork well and dust it with flour.

Roast

  1. Roast the chine for 2.5 to 3 hours, or the spare rib for 1.5 to 2 hours, basting often to prevent burning.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. To make the gravy, pour off excess fat from the drippings.

  2. Add a little hot water, dredge in flour, and season with salt.

  3. Serve the gravy over the roasted 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 + flourtop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,187 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Pork and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,187 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Pork
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender and juicy as it roasts slowly.
Flour
Dusted on the pork and whisked into the drippings, it thickens the gravy and helps it brown.
Coarse sea salt
Seasons the meat deeply and helps draw out moisture to form a flavourful surface.

The step that matters

Basting the roast. Basting often keeps the surface moist and prevents the flour and fat coating from scorching over a long roast. Scorched coating turns bitter, while a moist surface lets the crust brown evenly.

“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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