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Entrées: Escalopes
Escalopes de porc à la Lyonnaise are fillets cut in oval slices, breadcrumbed and fried; dressed in a border, covered with Soubise sauce, sprinkled with breadcrumbs and browned.
Escalopes de porc à la Robert are breadcrumbed and fried, and served with Robert sauce; à l'Indienne-with Indian sauce.
Croustades de porc à la Diable are little fillets on croûtes of fried bread, covered with a tomato sauce with cayenne, and sprinkled with grated cheese and breadcrumbs.
Ragoût de porc à la Portugaise is a stew of pork with Spanish onions. Aux cornichons, it is dressed with pickled gherkins.
Crépinettes à la sauce piquante are fried sausage balls or cakes, served with piquante sauce.
They are also served aux épinards, with spinach; and à la Française, with fried potatoes.
Pork gets a dozen lines here where mutton and veal get pages. Almost everything on it is the same move: a thin slice, crumbed, fried, and given a sauce with a name.
- Escalope means thin, not a cutAn escalope is a slice taken across the grain and flattened. The page draws them from the loin, and a butcher will cut them from loin or leg if asked; the word describes the thickness and the direction, not the part of the animal.
- Crépinettes need caulA crépinette is a flat sausage cake wrapped in caul, the lacy fat membrane from around a pig’s stomach. The caul holds the shape and bastes the cake as it melts. Butchers who make their own sausage still sell it, and without it a crépinette is only a patty.
- Sauce Robert is onion and mustardRobert is a brown sauce finished with onion and mustard, and it appears twice here because mustard cuts pork fat. Add julienned gherkins to the same sauce and it becomes Charcutière, which is the version most modern readers have met.
- Soubise is onionSoubise sauce is a thick onion purée bound with béchamel or with rice. It runs right through this book, and a reader who takes it for a proper name learns nothing from it. Read it as onion and the dishes make sense.
- Twice-crumbed and brownedÀ la Lyonnaise is crumbed and fried, then sauced in the dish, then crumbed again and browned. The second crust, under a grill, is the point of the dish and not a slip in the setting out.
- Croustade means the caseCroustades de porc à la Diable are small fillets sitting on fried bread under a cayenne-spiked tomato sauce with cheese and crumbs browned over. Croustade is the vessel, and here it is bread; elsewhere in the book it is pastry or rice.
The page is short, and the shortness is information. A book whose business is formal English dinners has very little use for pork, and what it finds for it is two small disguised things: a fried slice under a French name, and a sausage cake wrapped in membrane. That crépinette is worth sitting with. It is minced pork held together in the lining of a pig’s stomach, fried, and sent to a dinner table with a piquante sauce and a label in French. Nothing about the dish is grand and nothing about it is wasteful, and the book has arranged for a hostess to put it on a menu card without anyone at the table being able to tell. That transaction — the kitchen’s thrift, renamed — is the whole method of the volume, and it is plainest on the pages where the meat is cheapest.