Skip to main content
Main

To Boil a Leg of Pickled Pork

A leg of pickled pork is boiled, trimmed, and optionally glazed with sugar before serving with pea pudding.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 2 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Pork and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 37% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,579 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

To Boil a Leg of Pickled Pork

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare and simmer

  1. Wash the pork well to remove the pickle and scrape it clean.

  2. Simmer the pork slowly for 30 minutes per pound.

  3. Skim the pot carefully while cooking.

Trim and glaze

  1. Once cooked, scrape and trim the meat.

  2. If serving with the skin, score it in a diamond pattern and remove every other square.

  3. Glaze the scored skin with fine sugar.

  4. Place the glazed skin in a 400°F (200°C) oven, or use a salamander to glaze.

Serve

  1. Serve with pea pudding.

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. Pork + sugartop 37% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,579 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

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

What each ingredient does

Pickled pork leg
Salt-cured meat that becomes tender through slow simmering and forms the main dish.
Fine sugar
Caramelises under heat, browning and sweetening the scored skin.

The step that matters

Simmer the pork slowly. Gentle heat lets the connective tissue in the leg soften into tender meat. A rapid boil toughens the outer meat and can break the joint apart, so keep the liquid barely bubbling.

“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

Pork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes