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Broiled Pork and Chili Sauce
A considerable quantity of chili sauce many be prepared at once, as it keeps for some length of time; it should be ready before the meat is cooked. Cut from a leg of fresh pork the desired number of cutlets about half an inch thick. Place them in a double broiler, and cook moderately for twenty minutes, or till well done; then place on a hot dish, season well with salt and pepper, and a little butter. Serve with chili sauce in a sauce-boat.
A plain broil that assumes two things a modern cook will not have to hand: a hinged wire broiler and a jar of nineteenth-century chili sauce. Both are easily substituted.
- "Double broiler"Not a double boiler. This is a hinged wire basket that holds the meat between two grids so it can be turned in one motion over coals. A ridged grill pan, a gas or charcoal grill, or an oven broiler on a rack all do the same job.
- Fresh pork"Fresh" here means uncured, as opposed to salted and smoked pork, which was a common household staple. Cutlets from the leg are what a supermarket sells as fresh ham steak or leg steak; boneless loin chops of the same thickness behave similarly and are easier to find.
- Twenty minutes is far too longHalf-inch pork cutlets reach doneness in roughly three to four minutes a side. The long cooking here reflects an era before reliable measurement, when trichinosis was a real risk and "well done" was the only safeguard. Pork is safe at 145F internal with a three-minute rest, and at that point it is still faintly pink and juicy rather than grey.
- The chili sauceIn this period chili sauce is a cooked tomato relish -- tomatoes, onion, sweet pepper, vinegar, sugar and mild spice -- closer to a chunky ketchup than to anything hot. Any bottled American-style chili sauce, or a tomato relish of that type, is the right register. A modern chilli hot sauce is not.
- Make the sauce firstThe instruction to have it ready before the meat is cooked is the hinge of the recipe. The pork should go from broiler to hot dish to table; anything that keeps it waiting while a sauce is finished defeats the point.
- Seasoning after cookingSalt, pepper and butter go on once the cutlets come off the heat, so the butter melts into the meat rather than burning. Salting a few minutes before broiling also works well and seasons more evenly.
- YieldFigure one cutlet of six to eight ounces per person, with two to three tablespoons of sauce each.
Chili sauce became a fixture of the American preserving year in the later nineteenth century, put up at the end of tomato season and set on the table beside plain roasted and broiled meats. It belongs to the same family as ketchup and the sweet-sour "catsups" of pickled fruit and vegetable, and its heat came from a modest amount of sweet or mildly hot pepper rather than from anything a modern palate would call fiery. The pairing with plain broiled pork suggests what such sauces were for: bottled relishes added acidity and interest to meat cooked well past pink, as safety practice of the day advised. The note that the sauce "keeps for some length of time" is a reminder that this recipe was written for a kitchen where the preserving cupboard, not the shop, was the source of condiments.