A sucking-pig (BrE) or suckling pig (AmE) is a piglet fed on its mother's milk (i.e., a piglet which is still being "suckled"). In culinary contexts, a sucking-pig is slaughtered before the end of its second month. Celebrated since Greek and Roman times, it is traditionally cooked whole, usually roasted, in various cuisines, and is often prepared for special occasions and gatherings. A variation is popular in Spain and Portugal and their former empires under the name lechón (Spanish) or leitão (Portuguese), but the dish is common to many countries in Europe, the Americas and east Asia. Its popularity in Britain and the US has declined since the 19th century.
Definition and preparation According to Larousse Gastronomique, a piglet – in French a porcelet – is defined as a sucking-pig if it is below the age of two months. The Oxford Dictionary of Food and Nutrition defines the age as four to five weeks. It may weigh as little as three or four kilos (6.6 – 8.8 lbs). Mrs Beeton recommended putting the slaughtered piglet into cold water briefly and then immersing it in boiling water, before pulling off the hair and removing the entrails. In his 1907 Guide to Modern Cookery, Auguste Escoffier wrote, "Stuffed or not stuffed, sucking pigs are always roasted whole, and the essential point of the procedure is that they should be just done when their skin is crisp and golden".
History
Many recipes for sucking-pig survive from ancient times. Andrew Dalby in his Siren Feasts: A History of Food and Gastronomy in Greece (1996) draws attention to the precise and differentiated Greek vocabulary for categorising pigs of varying ages and sizes, and observes that "sucking-pigs, galathenoi, were a particular delicacy". Ancient Chinese and Roman cuisine valued the dish: Alan Davidson comments, "the Romans certainly liked sucking pig". In her 1985 Food and Cooking in Roman Britain, Jane Renfrew writes, "Sucking pig was roasted in the oven and then served with a thickened sauce flavoured with pepper, lovage, caraway, celery seed, asafoetida root, rue, liquamen, wine must and olive oil". Apicius's fifth-century cookery book De re coquinaria (About Cooking) contains several recipes for sucking-pig, including porcellum assum tractomelinum (stuffed with pastry and honey) and porcellum farsilem duobus generis (stuffed in two ways – one stuffing being a mixture of pepper, lovage, oregano, celery seed, cumin, fennel seed and rosemary, and the other containing laser root, cooked brains, raw eggs and boiled spelt). The sucking-pig appears in early texts such as the sixth-century Salic law. The first recorded use of the term in English dates from 1553: "Yonge suckynge pygges, porci delici". The Oxford Companion to Food (OCF) comments, "Sucking pigs are sometimes referred to as suckling pigs; this is incorrect, since it is the mothers who suckle and the young who suck". In the sixteenth century a common alternative term was "roasting pigs". Sucking-pigs were widely used in medieval cookery, and when it became more usual for pigs to be farmed than hunted in forests a larger proportion would be killed and sold as sucking-pigs. In the 18th century Hannah Glasse and in the 19th century Mrs Beeton published recipes for them, "always the most favoured way of cooking them"; Mrs Beeton stipulates, "A sucking-pig, to be eaten in perfection, should not be more than three weeks old, and should be dressed the same day that it is killed". The OCF adds, "in recent times sucking-pig has become less and less usual in England and the USA".
Regional dishes There are many variations in Western and Asian cuisines:
Europe, except Iberia In his 366 Menus and 1200 Recipes in French and English (1884) the French gourmet Baron Brisse includes "cochon de lait rôti – roast sucking-pig". He suggests stuffing the piglet with fresh butter seasoned with chopped herbs, salt and pepper or with chopped liver, bacon, mushrooms, capers, mixed herbs, salt and pepper. Cochon de lait Saint-Fortunat is stuffed with a mixture of cooked barley, the piglet's liver, herbs, chipolata sausages and braised chestnuts and roasted. Other French versions of sucking-pig are:
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