To my tastes, the best cuts of pork are the ones, at least here on the west coast, one never sees: the sirloin chop and the flank steak.
The sirloin chop has a large piece of very pale, tender, veal-like textured meat next to the bone and a ring of purplish dark meat around the outer edge. It equates to the prime rib cut in beef. It's rarely cut into chops, a butcher told me, because the public is put off by the color differentiation and has been somehow sedated into thinking that the tougher loin cut that is one continuous piece of meat from bone to edge is the best. Half the time they end up grinding it. Well, at the Food Pavillion over in Lynden the other day, they didn't, they left it whole on the bone, and I bought two roasts for $1.28 a pound--whole pork shoulder was $1.19. And no, they weren't on sale.
I brought them home, cut the meat off the bone, splayed them out and causing them to slightly overlap in the center, then liberally seasoned, rolled and tied them. I ended up with a beautiful boneless pork roast about 4" in diameter and 12" long for $9.33, 20 minutes of my time and a couple yards of string. It fed ten people at dinner that night and I have enough left over to make about six servings of portugese stew (pork cooked until falling apart with red bell peppers, garlic and a ton of cilantro). That's 58 cents per serving!!! Plus, I have bones for a meat stock.
And yeah, okay, it's not Berkshire pork, nor was it organically grown which I prefer and seek out, but for feeding a crowd? 58 cents a serving? How can you go wrong?
The other cut of meat I mentioned, the flank steak, I've never seen for sale in an American market, but in Holland I used to buy it all the time. They're small, but then Dutch pigs were generally smaller and far more tender than anything we buy over here anyway. It was a great little cut for roulades, or just marinating and grilling. Here, it must end up in the sausage heap. Too bad.