Name: To Bake a Sucking Pig
Ingredients: 1 sucking pig; ¼ pound butter; 1 egg white

Why it works: Butter and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 118,967 recipes. Both carry decanal, which smells soap, orange peel. The science ↓

To Bake a Sucking Pig

Ingredients

1 sucking pig
¼ pound butter
1 egg white

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

Prepare, stuff, and truss the pig as for roasting.
Brush the pig completely with well-beaten egg white.

Roast

Place the pig in the oven at 350°F (175°C).
Bake for 1.5 hours without basting.

Serve

Finish the presentation as you would for roast pig.

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.

Butter + eggtop 17% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together118,967 recipes

Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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 cooked meat, so its size and weight set the roasting time.
Egg white: Brushed over the skin to help it brown and crisp during roasting.
Butter: Adds fat and richness, helping the skin brown and the meat stay moist.

“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.