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Roast Loin of Pork

Roast a pork loin with optional lard or butter, bread crumb stuffing, and serve with apple sauce and pickles.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Sage and pepper match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,388 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Roast Loin of Pork

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 350°F (175°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Score the skin of the pork in strips about ¼ inch apart.

  2. If the pork is very lean, rub it with fresh lard or butter before roasting.

Roast and make the stuffing

  1. Place the pork in a roasting pan with a little water underneath.

  2. Roast at 350°F (175°C) for about 2 hours, or longer if the pork is very fat.

  3. For stuffing, mix bread crumbs, chopped sage, chopped onion, pepper, and salt; bake separately in a pie dish.

Make gravy and serve

  1. Make gravy by stirring flour into the pork drippings.

  2. Serve the roast with apple sauce and pickles.

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

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

  2. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  3. Sage + appletop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together755 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-hexenal (green, leafy).

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

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

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

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

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

What each ingredient does

Pork loin
Provides the main meat, whose fat and skin shape the final texture and flavour of the roast.
Bread crumbs
Form the bulk of the stuffing, soaking up moisture and holding the sage and onion together.
Flour
Thickens the pan drippings into gravy by gelatinising in the hot fat and liquid.
Onion
Adds savoury sweetness and aroma to the stuffing as it cooks.
Sage
Contributes a distinctive aromatic, herbal flavour to the stuffing.

The step that matters

Scoring the skin. Shallow, evenly spaced cuts let fat render out and let the skin dry and crisp in the oven, rather than staying chewy or tough.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Avocadofits better
  3. Limefits about as well
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, bread, sage, onion, pepper, flour. 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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