Skip to main content
Main

To Roast a Sucking Pig

A roasted suckling pig stuffed with bread crumbs, sage, butter, and seasoned, served with veal gravy and optional mace and lemon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 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. Wipe the pig dry and fill its body with bread crumbs, sage, butter, salt, and pepper.

  2. Sew the pig up with strong cotton and truss it like a hare.

  3. Rub the pig with butter as it warms.

Roast

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

  2. Cover the pig with muslin or thin cloth.

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

  4. Hang a pig iron or large flat iron in the center of the grate to ensure even cooking.

  5. When the pig is light amber brown, wipe it dry.

  6. Rub the pig with cold butter.

Serve

  1. When ready, place the pig on a hot dish.

  2. Remove the spit.

  3. Open the head.

  4. Chop the stuffing and brains and mix them with veal gravy, Madeira, and the drippings.

  5. Pour some gravy under the meat.

  6. Serve the rest hot in a tureen.

  7. Add pounded mace and lemon juice if desired.

  8. Serve with bread sauce and plain gravy.

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

Bread crumbs
Absorb juices and drippings in the stuffing, giving a moist, soft filling.
Butter
Adds fat that browns the skin and keeps the meat moist as it roasts.
Veal gravy
Supplies liquid and savoury body for the sauce served with the pig.
Madeira or sherry
Adds wine flavour and sweetness to the gravy.
Sage
Contributes a savoury, aromatic herbal flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Roast at a moderate distance from a clear fire. Too close a fire scorches the skin before the thick body cooks through, while even heat and regular basting with butter promote even amber browning and a moist interior.

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