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Roast Pork

Roast Pork is a pork roast cooked with a breadcrumb and lemon peel rub, served with apple sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Roast Pork

Why it works: Lemon and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,047 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Roast Pork

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pork

  1. Score the skin of the pork until the knife touches the meat.

  2. Rub a mixture of bread crumbs, onion juice, grated lemon peel, lemon juice, pepper, and salt into the scored skin.

  3. Place the pork in a roaster with 1 cup of hot water underneath.

Roast

  1. Cover and heat until the water begins to steam, then reduce the heat.

  2. Cook for 25 minutes per pound, basting often with the gravy.

  3. Twenty minutes before removing the meat, pour off the gravy and chill it to separate the fat.

Finish the gravy

  1. Thicken the gravy with browned flour if desired, or serve with apple sauce.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

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

  2. Pork + oniontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,214 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  3. Onion + peppertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  5. Pork + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

What each ingredient does

Pork with skin
Provides the main meat, whose scored skin crisps while the inside stays moist.
Fine bread crumbs
Absorb the lemon and onion juices, helping hold the seasoning on the scored skin.
Onion juice
Adds savory flavor to the crumb rub that seasons the pork.
Grated lemon peel
Adds aromatic citrus oils that perfume the pork's surface.
Lemon juice
Adds acidity that brightens the rich pork flavor.
Browned flour
Thickens the gravy so it coats the meat and serving spoon.

The step that matters

Pour off and chill the gravy before the end of roasting. Chilling lets the fat rise and solidify so it can be separated from the gravy. Removing it first keeps the gravy from becoming greasy, which matters if you thicken it with flour.

Swap the apple

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, bread, onion, lemon, pepper, flour, sauce):

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Limefits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, bread, onion, lemon, pepper, flour, sauce. 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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