Skip to main content
Main

Roast Sucking Pig

A whole pig roasted with sage and onion stuffing, butter, and served with gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sage and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 887 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Roast Sucking Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Clean the pig thoroughly.

  2. Stuff it with sage and onion stuffing or veal forcemeat.

  3. Sew it up with strong thread and truss it like a hare.

  4. Dry the pig well and dredge it with flour.

Roast

  1. Place it before a clear fire and baste with butter until it produces enough gravy.

Carve and serve

  1. When done, cut off the head and split the pig in half.

  2. Lay the backs together, place the ears on each side, and the halves of the head at each end of the dish.

  3. Pour gravy over the pig and serve additional gravy in a sauceboat.

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 + lemontop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together887 recipes

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

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

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

  3. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

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

  4. Flour + buttertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  5. Sage + oniontop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

Flour and butter barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Flour
Forms a dry coating on the skin that helps it brown and crisp as it roasts.
Butter
Adds fat that bastes the skin, promoting browning and flavor while drippings form gravy.
Sage and onion stuffing
Fills the cavity, flavoring the meat from inside and gently moistening it as it cooks.

The step that matters

Basting with butter before the gravy forms. The skin must be dry and dredged before roasting, and basting must be steady. Fat carries heat to the surface and drives browning, while drippings build the gravy. Uneven basting can leave pale or dry skin.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Arrowrootfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, flour, butter, lemon, bread, apple. 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 recipesLemon SauceLemon Sauce236 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipesBread OmeletteBread Omelette60 recipes