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PORK (a la Francaise)
Take about four pounds of loin of pork, and let it lie for two days in a marinade composed of a shallot finely minced, a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, six peppercorns, a dessert-spoonful of salt, and a quarter of a pint of salad oil. Rub the mixture well into every part of the pork, and cover the meat up in an earthen pan. Roast it well, basting it frequently, using during the last half hour the oil in which it was marinaded. Serve it on a hot dish with brown gravy round it, and with a sauce made as follows in a tureen. Chop fine an apple and a small onion; fry them in butter till tender, then crush to pulp, mix a tea-cupful of stock with them, and add a little salt and cayenne, a spoonful of mustard, a spoonful of sugar, and the juice of a lemon. Stir over the fire till it boils, add a spoonful of cognac, and serve.
A marinated pork loin roast with an apple-mustard sauce that sits somewhere between applesauce and sauce Robert. Nothing here is difficult; the main gaps are the vague Victorian measures and the two-day marinade, which needs to happen in the refrigerator rather than in a crock on the larder floor.
- Marinate coldTwo days in a covered earthen pan meant a cool larder. Use a non-reactive dish or a bag in the refrigerator, and turn the meat once a day so the small amount of oil coats it evenly.
- The measuresA quarter of an imperial pint of oil is 5 fl oz, a little over half a US cup. A dessert-spoonful is 2 teaspoons, so the salt is roughly 2 teaspoons for 4 lb of meat. A tea-cupful of stock is around 5 to 6 fl oz.
- Salad oilIn this period the term meant a mild olive oil, sometimes a refined nut or seed oil sold specifically for dressings. Either olive or a neutral oil works; the marinade is mostly a carrier for the shallot, parsley and pepper.
- Roasting"Roast it well" in an unspecified oven: start a 4 lb loin at 425F for 20 minutes, then drop to 325F and cook to an internal 145F at the centre, roughly 20 minutes per pound in total. Rest it 15 minutes before carving.
- The marinade oil at the endPouring the used marinade over the meat for the last half hour is safe because it goes into a hot pan and cooks with the drippings. Do not spoon it over the finished roast, and do not use it uncooked in the sauce.
- The sauce hinges on the appleCook the apple and onion slowly in butter until genuinely collapsing before you crush them; underdone apple leaves the sauce grainy and thin. A tart cooking apple such as Bramley or Granny Smith gives the acidity the recipe assumes.
- Mustard and cognacAdd the mustard with the other seasonings as written, but the cognac goes in after the sauce has boiled so it keeps its aroma. Taste before adding all the sugar and lemon: the balance depends entirely on how sharp the apple is.
- YieldA 4 lb loin serves six to eight, and the sauce makes about a cup, which is ample for that number.
The label à la française in a late-Victorian English dictionary of cookery usually signals nothing more precise than "dressed in the French manner" — here, a marinade of oil, shallot and herbs rather than the plain roast and applesauce an English cook would have expected. What is interesting is that the applesauce has not actually been abandoned; it has been rebuilt along French lines into something close to a sauce Robert, the classic onion-mustard sauce traditionally paired with pork, with apple, lemon and sugar standing in for the wine and vinegar. The recipe presents the mixture purely as flavouring rubbed into the meat, though the two-day marinade may also reflect a kitchen without refrigeration, where a cool larder and a well-oiled surface could themselves help in keeping meat.