Why Is An Apple Placed In The Mouth Of A Hog Roast?

Because it works.

We have carried a lot of hogs out in front of a lot of people — wedding marquees, back gardens, Borough Market on a Saturday. The thing that gets the noise isn't the crackling, and the crackling is the best bit. It's the apple.

Take the apple out and it's a cooked pig. Put the apple in and it's an occasion.

That's the honest answer. Most of the rest is tradition that has been given a reason afterwards.

The traditions are real enough

Apples and pork have been eaten together for as long as anyone has been writing food down. Apple sauce with roast pork. Applewood for smoking, because of what that particular smoke does to the fat.

Roast pork was harvest food, and at harvest there were apples everywhere — including in the pigs, on the belief that it sweetened the meat. Some say the apple in the mouth marks that: the thing the animal ate in life, handed back at the table. Take that as poetry rather than history, but it is a good bit of poetry.

The one you can ignore

You will read that the apple flavours the meat. That the juice runs down into the cheeks while it cooks.

It doesn't. An apple in a pig's mouth over seven hours of fire does not survive as an apple. Anything that goes in at the start comes out as sugar and ash.

The apple you see when the hog is carried out went in about ninety seconds earlier, round the back, while everyone was still drinking.

So it is for the look of the thing

That is not a small reason.

Nobody remembers a tray of food. People remember the moment the whole animal came through the door and the room went quiet, and then loud. A hog roast is theatre before it is dinner. The fire has been lit since morning. Everyone has been smelling it all afternoon. Then it arrives.

The apple is the last bit of punctuation on a very long sentence.

So we put one in. Every time.

Planning something where you want that moment — a wedding, a party, a summer do? Tell us about it and we will tell you how we would cook it.