Wild Pork Roman Shield Roast

This recipe was inspired by a Rick Stein cooking programme that my wife and I watched. The story was told that Roman soldiers sometimes used to cook a 'roast' meal between a couple of their curved metal shields.

We don't have any Roman shields, so we adapted the recipe to what we had. We liked it so much, we asked a potter buddy to make us a special dish with a lid for the job. In reality, any covered oven-proof dish should work.

When we started making this, we thought we should follow what we believed was the tradition of turning the dish upside down during the cook. Consequently our special dish has a lid with about the same volume as the base... and it has a lip that overlaps the base on the inside. This means that we'd put all the ingredients into the 'lid' for a start... thus the lid was on the bottom..... then part way through the cooking we'd invert the whole dish. The inside lip helped prevent juices from running outside the dish and making a mess. Turning the dish may appeal to some if more even 'browning' of the food is desired.... and if you are cooking over a fire then inverting is probably the best thing to do to ensure everything gets cooked properly. But we've found it is unnecessary to perform this rather hazardous step when using a conventional oven.

Ingredients:

Smallish slices of pork, maybe no more than 25mm thick.
Onions
Potatoes
Thyme (and rosemary if you like it. We use fresh stuff from the garden. You can strip the leaves off, or toss the whole branches in).
Olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt
Kale leaves or silver beet (optional).

Preheat your oven to 250 C ... which is probably the maximum position on many oven thermostats (preheating is not essential, but it may save time). Glug some olive oil into the bottom of the dish. Use plenty. Peel the onions and peel or scrub the potatoes. Cut the onions into slices and the potatoes into smallish chunks. Lay the onion slices down to cover the bottom of the dish, then lay more around the sides. Place the thyme in the middle of the dish on top of the onions. Lay the meat on top of the thyme. Pour a heap of olive oil over the meat and onions. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Lay the slices of potato on top of the meat. Sprinkle more olive oil over the potatoes and follow that with a little more salt and pepper. We use plenty of oil which I think compensates well for the leanness of most wild pork.

Put the lid on the dish and place in the oven. The cooking should be complete in maybe 55 to 65 minutes. You'll know when you look inside.

Sometimes, if there is space in the dish (plus the ingredients generally sink down a bit when cooking)... we take the dish out of the oven about 10 minutes early and fill any empty space with roughly torn kale leaves. The lid is replaced as quickly as possible and the dish is returned to the oven for the remaining 10 to 15 minutes. We really like the roasted kale, especially when we spoon the rich, oily juices over it (we also like kale chips... but that is another story).

We eat this a lot, especially in the colder weather.

https://i.imgur.com/zVkOTCU.jpg