Spare ribs

Instructions on how to butcher, cook and carve a spare rib of pork from an 1831 Cincinnati cookbook is below.  During this time, the city contained large hog packing operations, shipping the meat to the eastern markets.

Recipe

SPARE-RIB.

Should be basted with a very little butter and a little flour, and then sprinkled with a little dried sage crumbled.—Apple-sauce and potatoes for roasted pork.

Recipe

A spare-rib should be basted with a little butter, a little dust of flour, and some sage and onion shred small. Apple sauce is the only one which suits this dish.

Carving

A spare-rib of pork is carved, by cutting out a slice from the fleshy part, in the line a,b. This joint will afford many good cuts in this direction, with as much fat as people like to eat of such strong meat. When the fleshy part is cut away, a bone may be easily separated from the next to it, in the line d, b, c, disjointing it at c. 

Butchering

The sides of a hog are made into bacon, and the inside is cut out with very little meat to the bone. On each side there is a large sparerib; which is usually divided into two, one sweet-bone, and a blade-bone.

Family Receipts: or Practical Guide for the Husbandman and Housewife containing a great variety of valuable recipes, relating to Agriculture, Gardening, Brewery, Cookery, Dairy, Confectionary, Diseases, Farriery, Ingrafting, and the various branches of Rural and Domestic Economy; to which is added a plain, concise method, of keeping farmer's accounts, with forms of notes of hand, bills, receipts, &c, &c by H. L. Barnum, Editor of the “United States Agriculturist and Farmer’s Reporter.”  Cincinnati: Lincoln & Co., 1831

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