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PORK, FILLETS OF (a la Perigueux)
Bone a small neck of pork, trim off all the fat, and lard one side with strips of fat bacon. Place it in a deep pan, on a bed of sliced carrot, onion, and a bouquet garni, season with pepper and salt, and moisten with a glass of sherry and a gill of brown stock. Let it come to the boil, and finish cooking in a moderate oven, basting it well from time to time. When done, take it up, strain the liquor into a small stewpan, add about three-quarters of a pint of PERIGUEUX SAUCE, boil up, and let it simmer a few minutes. Dish up the neck, cut into fillets about a quarter of an inch thick; pour some of the sauce over, and serve the remainder separately. A mound of mashed potatoes will serve as a base for the fillets, and much improve the appearance of the dish.
A braise disguised as a roast: the pork starts on the stovetop in wine and stock, finishes uncovered in the oven, and its cooking liquor becomes the base of the sauce. The success of the dish rests entirely on the Périgueux sauce, which Cassell's expects you to look up separately.
- Get the sauce sorted firstPérigueux sauce is a demi-glace or brown sauce finished with Madeira and chopped truffle. Three-quarters of a pint is 15 fl oz, close to 2 cups. Without it the dish is simply braised pork; make or buy the sauce before you begin, and expect truffle to be the single largest cost.
- Neck of porkThis is the collar or shoulder end, broadly the cut sold in the US as pork butt or Boston butt. The recipe only says "a small" one; boned, such a joint would likely be somewhere around 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 lb and serve four to six. Ask the butcher to bone and tie it, or roll and tie it yourself so it slices cleanly.
- Trimming the fatThe instruction to remove all the fat is worth following only on the outside surface; shoulder is marbled throughout and that internal fat is what keeps it from drying out. Strip the outer fat cap, leave the seams alone.
- LardingPiercing the meat with strips of fat bacon needs a larding needle, which few kitchens now own. Laying thin bacon or pancetta over the top and tying it in place (barding) gives most of the same benefit with none of the equipment.
- MeasuresA gill is a quarter of a pint, 5 fl oz British or a generous half cup. A "glass" of sherry in Victorian recipe writing usually means a wineglassful, commonly reckoned at about 2 fl oz, though usage varied. Use a dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry.
- Oven heat and timeA moderate oven is usually taken today as somewhere around 325-350F. The recipe gives no time; with frequent basting, a 3 lb boned collar will likely want about 2 to 2 1/2 hours; add a little more stock if the pan threatens to run dry. Shoulder slices best when taken well past the 145F minimum, to around 185F, where the connective tissue has softened.
- Cutting the filletsRest the joint 15 minutes before carving, then cut across the grain into quarter-inch slices. Cutting hot and too thick is what turns this from an elegant plate into a slab of pot roast.
- ServingOverlap the slices on a mound of stiff mashed potato, spoon over just enough sauce to gloss them, and send the rest to the table in a boat. Carrots, onion and bouquet garni from the braise have given up their flavour and should be discarded with the strained liquor's solids.
The name points to P he P Périgueux, the chief town of the Périgord in south-west France, a region long associated with black truffles; in classical French kitchen usage, sauce Périgueux is a brown sauce or demi-glace finished with Madeira and chopped truffle, while the related Périgourdine keeps the truffle in slices and often adds foie gras. Almost any nineteenth-century dish labelled à la Périgueux is therefore announcing truffle rather than a regional method of cooking. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, arranged alphabetically and heavily cross-referenced, routinely builds dishes like this one out of components documented elsewhere in the volume, which is why the sauce here is named in capitals and not explained. That a cheap cut such as neck of pork is dressed with one of the most expensive garnishes in the repertoire may reflect the way the great French sauces filtered from grand houses into middle-class household manuals, though that is interpretation rather than established fact.