Don't Sweat the Aubergine

you can rest the meat on a bed of sliced onions, which you discard at the end – for about 5 hours (for a 1.5kg piece of pork belly), or longer. 2 Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says that an 8kg shoulder will tolerate 24 hours of cooking. At the end, slice off the rind, and fry it to produce crackling as in the loin recipe, above.
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VARIATIONS
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    These are forgiving cuts, with plenty of fat and connective tissue; I like to cook them slowly until the meat is exceptionally soft. But you could use the higher temperatures and faster timings given above for loin joints, and produce perfectly nice results.
    Pork goes well with oriental flavourings. For his 5kg to 8kg shoulder, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall gives the following paste: 1 tbsp of a spice mix consisting of 2 star anise, 2 tsp fennel seeds, 1/2 cinnamon stick, 4 cloves, and 1 tsp black peppercorns, all ground; stirred into a mixture of 5 garlic cloves (crushed and made into a paste), a 5cm piece of ginger (also made into a paste), 2 tsp dried chilli flakes, 2 tsp ground ginger, 1 tbsp brown sugar, 1/2 tbsp salt, 1 tbsp sunflower or groundnut oil, and 1 tbsp soy sauce. You’re most likely to have a smaller joint than the one in his recipe, so you can revise these quantities accordingly – and anyway, it’s the kind of list you can adapt to your own taste.
    Or try pot-roasting. 3 Oil a heavy casserole dish such as a Le Creuset, lay a bed of sliced onions on the bottom, lightly oil your joint and season it to taste, cover, and put in a very low oven 4 for about 4 hours, or until entirely tender. You may find that the meat and onions throw off quite a lot of liquid, which you can skim, reduce in a small saucepan until flavoursome, and serve as a sauce. Again, if you want crackling, slice off the rind and fry it.
    You’re often told that salt draws out the moisture from meat. But brining – immersing in a salt solution – can make tough cuts of meat juicier and more tender. Fergus Henderson has a lovely recipe for brined and roasted pork belly (from
Nose to Tail Eating
).
    Henderson’s brine includes 4 litres of water, 400g caster sugar, 600g sea salt, 12 juniper berries, 12 cloves, 12 black peppercorns, and 3 bay leaves: you put the ingredients in a pot and bring to the boil, in order to get the sugar and the salt to dissolve. Allow to cool. Put the meat into a china, glass or other non-reactive container, cover with brine, put a lid on, then leave it in a cool place for 3 days (your fridge may not be big enough; I use my cellar). Take the meat out; dry the skin and treat it as above; roast in a medium to hot oven (I should guess Henderson means gas mark 6/200°C), allowing 1 1/2 to 2 hours for a 2kg joint.
    Or you could roast the joint at the very low setting recommended above. If you’re serving it for lunch, though, you might not want to get up at 7 a. m. to put it in the oven.
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ACCOMPANIMENTS
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    Mashed potato ( see here ) is perfect with pork, I think. And green vegetables: particularly cabbage, greens or spinach. Pork doesn’t give you much help in making a gravy, so I prefer to eat it with mustard. For apple sauce: peel, core and slice up apples, putting them into water acidified with lemon juice to prevent discoloration; drain and put them into a pan above a heat disperser on a low heat, and cover; as they cook, judge whether you need to add more liquid (try a little orange juice); cook until you have a rough purée, and add caster sugar to taste. It’s up to you whether you serve it hot; it doesn’t have to be.
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WHY YOU DO IT
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    1 • Spare rib and spare ribs . A spare rib cut, from which your butcher might sell spare rib chops, is not the same as the spare ribs commonly used for barbecuing. The former comes from the shoulder; the latter are trimmed from the belly.
    2 • How low is low? Your lowest oven temperature may, like mine, be 130°C, or more. And if yours is a fan oven, your food will not in theory be any cooler on the floor of it than anywhere else . You may, in these cases, produce better results if you cover the roasting pan with foil. See point 3.
    3 • Pot-roasting . Recipes for pot roasts may tell you that the moist atmosphere of a covered pot will keep your joint more tender than would the raw heat of your oven. This claim is not necessarily true. Water, as I explained above when discussing chicken, is a more efficient heating medium than air. So your result depends on the variability of the temperature of your