Skip to main content
Main

To Roast a Sucking Pig

A roast suckling pig stuffed with bread crumbs, sage, butter, and seasonings, served with a veal gravy sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 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 ↓

To Roast a Sucking Pig

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pig

  1. After scalding the pig, dry it thoroughly.

  2. Fill the body with bread crumbs, sage, butter, salt, and pepper or cayenne.

  3. Sew the pig up with strong cotton.

  4. Truss it like a hare, with forelegs skewered back and hind legs forward.

Roast

  1. Roast it over a strong, clear fire, keeping it at a moderate distance to avoid scorching.

  2. Once warm, rub it with butter.

  3. Cover it with muslin or thin cloth, repeating this while roasting.

  4. Place basins under the pig to catch the dripping gravy.

  5. When the pig is a light amber brown and steam draws towards the fire, dry it with a clean cloth.

  6. Rub it with cold butter.

  7. Halfway through cooking, hang a large flat iron in the center of the grate to ensure even cooking.

  8. When ready, place the pig in a very hot dish.

  9. Remove the spit.

  10. Open the head, and split the body in two.

Make the sauce and serve

  1. Chop the stuffing and brains together.

  2. Mix with veal gravy, Madeira or sherry, and the drippings from the pig.

  3. Pour some of the mixture under the meat.

  4. Serve the rest hot in a tureen, adding mace, cayenne, and lemon juice if desired.

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. Pepper + lemontop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Sage + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,388 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

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

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

  5. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

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

What each ingredient does

Sucking pig
Provides the main meat, which is roasted whole and carved for serving.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, and rubbing it on the skin promotes browning and moisture.
Bread crumbs
Absorb the drippings and juices inside the body, giving the stuffing body and moisture.
Veal gravy
Adds savory depth and moisture to the sauce served with the pig.
Madeira or sherry
Adds sweetness and aroma to the gravy mixture.

The step that matters

Keep the pig at a moderate distance from the fire. Too close a fire scorches the skin before the thick meat cooks through, while steady moderate heat lets the fat render and the skin brown evenly.

Swap the mace

The recipe marks mace as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, sage, butter, pepper, veal, sherry, lemon):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, sage, butter, pepper, veal, sherry, lemon. 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