Skip to main content
Main

To Roast Sucking-pig

A roast suckling pig stuffed with sage, bread crumbs, butter, pepper, and salt, served with apple sauce and gravy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 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 ↓

To Roast Sucking-pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Cut off the feet of the suckling pig and fill the inside with a stuffing made of chopped sage, bread crumbs, butter, pepper, and salt.

  2. Sew up the slit; no skewering is required.

Roast

  1. Roast the pig, basting with butter, for 2 to 3 hours, depending on size, until the skin is crisp and nicely browned.

Serve

  1. Before serving, split the pig down the back from head to tail and lay it flat on a dish with the skin side up.

  2. Cut off the head, split it in two, and place a half at each end.

  3. Remove the brains and mix them with the liver (previously boiled and finely chopped) and beef or veal gravy in a small tureen.

  4. Serve with apple sauce.

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. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + beeftop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,971 recipes

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

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

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

  5. Bread + beeftop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,032 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

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

What each ingredient does

Suckling pig
Forms the main dish; its skin becomes crisp and browned during roasting.
Bread crumbs
Bulk the sage stuffing and soak up butter and juices inside the pig.
Butter
Basting fat that helps the skin brown and crisp while roasting.
Sage
Adds a savory, aromatic herbal flavor to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Roasting until the skin is crisp. The skin must dry and brown fully for crispness; basting with butter promotes browning, but timing depends on the pig's size, so underdone or overcooked skin is a common error.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Figfits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, bread, butter, pepper, sauce, beef. 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 recipesRoast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipes