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Roast Pig

A whole young pig roasted with onion dressing, butter, and seasoning, served with gravy and garnishes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Parsley and celery match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,810 recipes. Both carry 4'-methylacetophenone, which smells bitter almond. The science ↓

Roast Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pig

  1. Prepare the dressing as for fowls, adding chopped onion, and set aside.

  2. Wash the pig thoroughly inside and out.

  3. In a separate bowl, mix water with baking soda, then rinse the inside of the pig again.

  4. Wipe the pig dry with a fresh towel, salt the inside, and stuff it with the prepared dressing.

  5. Sew the pig up and place it in a kneeling position in a roasting pan, tying the legs properly.

Roast

  1. Pour a little hot salted water into the pan and baste the pig with butter and water as it warms.

  2. Once the pig begins to smoke, rub it often with a rag dipped in melted butter to keep the skin crisp.

  3. Roast the pig for 2 to 3 hours, basting regularly.

Make the gravy

  1. To make gravy, skim off most of the grease, stir in flour, add water to achieve desired consistency, and season with pepper.

  2. Let the gravy boil once, strain it, and add wine if desired.

Serve and carve

  1. Serve the pig on a large hot platter, garnished with parsley or celery tops, a green wreath around the neck, and a sprig of celery in its mouth.

  2. When carving, cut off the head first, then split down the back, and separate the hams, shoulders, and ribs.

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. Parsley + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  2. Pepper + parsleytop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Pepper + celerytop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together16,012 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Onion + celerytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,518 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Onion + parsleytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Young pig
Provides the meat that is roasted whole, with the stuffing cooking inside it.
Butter
Basting fat that browns the skin and keeps it crisp during roasting.
Baking soda
Mixed with water and rinsed through the pig, it is used to clean the inside.
Flour
Thickens the skimmed pan drippings into the gravy.
Onion
Adds aromatic flavor to the dressing stuffed inside the pig.

The step that matters

Keeping the skin crisp. Rubbing the skin often with butter-dipped rag and basting keeps fat on the surface, helping it brown and crisp while the interior cooks through over the long roast.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, flour, pepper, wine, parsley, celery):

  1. Carrotfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, flour, pepper, wine, parsley, celery. 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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