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Pork Cutlets and Tomato Sauce
Cut and trim some cutlets from a small loin of pork; flatten them to a nice shape, and grill over a clear fire for ten to fifteen minutes. Brush them over with glaze, and serve on a mound of mashed potatoes with thick tomato sauce round the dish.
A late-Victorian grill recipe stripped to essentials: chop, glaze, potato, sauce. The gaps are all in what the book assumes you already know.
- "A clear fire"This means a coal or charcoal fire burned down past the smoke to steady red heat — the nearest modern equivalents are a charcoal grill after the coals have ashed over, a ridged cast-iron grill pan, or an overhead broiler on high. Flame-licked cutlets will taste of soot rather than pork.
- Cutting the cutletsFrom a loin, these are bone-in chops. The recipe gives no thickness; flattened to around 3/4 inch the timings below will hold. Trim the fat to a thin rim rather than removing it, and nick the rim in two or three places so the chop does not buckle on the grill.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is for thin, well-done chopsModern pork is bred much leaner and does not need the old margin against trichinella. Cook to 145F at the centre and rest five minutes; on a hot grill that is nearer 4 to 5 minutes a side for a 3/4-inch chop. Fifteen minutes will give you the dry, pale meat this era took for granted.
- GlazeIn Cassell's, glaze is meat stock reduced to a syrup that sets firm when cold — brushed on warm, it gives shine and a concentrated savoury note. A few tablespoons of well-reduced brown chicken or veal stock does the same job; a spoonful of good demi-glace thinned slightly is the shortcut.
- Thick tomato saucePeriod tomato sauce is a cooked, sieved sauce thickened with roux or reduction, not a fresh salsa and not ketchup. It needs to hold a line around the edge of the dish rather than run under the potatoes, so reduce it until a spoon drawn through leaves a track.
- The mound of potatoMashed potato here is a serving vessel as much as a side — piled and smoothed on a hot platter, with the cutlets leaned against it. Keep it stiff enough to hold shape; a loose, cream-heavy mash will collapse into the sauce.
- YieldReckon one to two cutlets a person; a small loin will give six to eight, serving four.
Cassell's places this among the plainest of the grilled meats, and its brevity is the point "" a late-Victorian household cook was expected to know what a clear fire looked like, how to reduce stock to glaze, and how to build a dish on a mound of potato without being told. The pairing of pork with tomato sauce reflects how far the tomato had travelled in British kitchens over the nineteenth century: by this date it was a standard sauce of the professional repertoire, cooked down and sieved in the French manner rather than eaten raw. The insistence on cooking pork thoroughly ran through Victorian cookery writing, reinforced by what is generally traced to the mid-century identification of trichinella in pork and the general distrust of the pig as a scavenging animal; the fifteen-minute grill may well owe more to that anxiety than to flavour.