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Sucking Pig

A roast pig basted with hot water, salt, salad oil, and bacon, served with onion‑sage bread crumb balls and apple or tomato puree.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and apple work together. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 755 recipes. Both carry 2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Sucking Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Roast the pig

  1. Roast the sucking pig before a brisk fire, basting it with hot water and a pinch of coarse sea salt in the dripping pan.

  2. Once the water is poured away, replace it with salad oil and continue to baste.

  3. Rub a piece of fat bacon up and down the crackling to keep it from scorching and to make it crisp.

Make the garnish

  1. Make balls with onion, sage, and bread crumbs.

  2. Coat the balls with breadcrumbs and eggs.

  3. Fry the balls for garnish.

Serve

  1. Serve with a puree of apples or tomatoes.

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

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

  2. Onion + sagetop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,628 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Bread + eggtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together22,662 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  4. Bread + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,790 recipes

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

  5. Sage + breadtop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,778 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

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

What each ingredient does

Sucking pig
Is the main meat, cooked whole until the skin crisps and the meat cooks through.
Fat bacon
Rubbed over the crackling, its fat helps the skin crisp and keeps it from scorching.
Eggs
Bind the breadcrumb coating so it adheres to the balls during frying.
Bread crumbs
Form the body of the balls and give the coating a crisp, golden exterior when fried.

The step that matters

Rubbing the crackling with bacon. Fat helps the skin dry and crisp rather than scorch over a hot fire, so the bacon must be rubbed on evenly and the skin kept from burning.

Swap the onion

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

  1. Sweet potatofits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Parsnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sage, bread, egg, 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.

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