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Baked Pork Tenderloin
Trim and wipe tenderloins with damp cloth. Split them nearly through to make them lie flat. Rub with salt and pepper. Make a dressing with bread crumbs, shortening, salt, pepper, onion and a little sage. (See any poultry dressing recipe for quantities.) Spread the dressing on half the tenderloin, turn the other half over it and tie or sew all around. Bake 45 minutes, basting often with 3 tablespoons shortening in 1/4 cup boiling water. Remove to hot platter. Make gravy of the broth and pour over the tenderloins. Allow half a tenderloin per person.
A stuffed and tied pork tenderloin, written for cooks who already knew their dressing proportions and their own oven. Two things need filling in: the temperature, which the original omits, and the doneness, which 1930s pork cookery got badly wrong in the other direction.
- Oven temperatureNo setting is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for 45 minutes on a stuffed tenderloin; anything hotter dries the outside before the dressing heats through.
- What a tenderloin meantThe instruction to split one nearly through and serve half a tenderloin per person may point to a larger cut than the trimmed 12-16 oz tenderloins sold today, though half a modern tenderloin with dressing is also a fair portion. Two modern tenderloins butterflied, stuffed and tied together into a single roll comes closest, and on the recipe's own reckoning serves four.
- ShorteningHere it means lard or a solid vegetable shortening, used both in the dressing and for basting. Butter or oil works in either place.
- The dressing quantitiesFor a stuffed roll of this size, figure about 2 cups soft bread crumbs, 3 tablespoons fat, half a small onion softened in it, and no more than a quarter teaspoon rubbed sage. Sage overwhelms pork very quickly.
- DonenessCook to 145F in the meat and 165F in the dressing, checked with a thermometer rather than by the clock. Pork of this period was routinely taken to grey; a modern tenderloin held there is ruined, and 45 minutes may well be longer than yours needs.
- Basting liquidThree tablespoons of fat in a quarter cup of boiling water is a small amount that will cook away. Top up the pan with water or stock as it goes so you have something left to make gravy with.
- TyingButcher's twine at 1-inch intervals is easier than sewing and comes off cleanly at the table. Let the roll rest 10 minutes before cutting the strings or the dressing spills.
- The gravySkim most of the fat, keep about 2 tablespoons, stir in an equal amount of flour, cook it a minute and whisk in the pan liquid made up to a cup with stock.
Stuffing a split loin or tenderloin with the same bread-and-sage dressing used for poultry was standard economy in American home cooking: it stretched a lean, quick-cooking cut to feed more people and added moisture to meat that had none of its own. The parenthetical "see any poultry dressing recipe for quantities" is characteristic of menu-and-recipe books of the period, which assumed a cook with a working repertoire and used their pages for combinations rather than fundamentals.