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Pork Tenderloins with Sweet Potatoes
Wipe tenderloins, put in a dripping-pan, and brown quickly in a hot oven; then sprinkle with salt and pepper, and bake forty-five minutes, basting every fifteen minutes.
Sweet Potatoes. Pare six potatoes and parboil ten minutes, drain, put in pan with meat, and cook until soft, basting when basting meat.
A one-pan roast that assumes a much fatter animal than the one at your butcher counter. The timing is the part to rethink.
- The 45 minutes is the problemA modern trimmed pork tenderloin weighs about 1 to 1 1/4 lb and reaches 145F in roughly 20 to 25 minutes after searing. Held for 45 minutes it will be dry and grey throughout. Cook to temperature, not to the clock.
- Why the original is so longPork was cooked hard and well into the 20th century out of fear of trichinosis, and the meat itself came from fatter hogs that tolerated it. Neither condition applies now; 145F with a three-minute rest is the current standard for whole cuts.
- Oven heatThe book gives no temperatures in degrees; a "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 400 to 450F. Brown at that heat for 10 minutes, then drop to 375F for the rest, which also suits the potatoes.
- Dripping-panA shallow rimmed roasting or sheet pan, not a covered dish. Shallow matters here: the meat and potatoes should roast and brown rather than steam.
- Basting needs fatToday's tenderloin is very lean and yields almost nothing to baste with. Rub the meat with oil and add a few spoonfuls of butter, lard or bacon fat to the pan, or the potatoes will scorch dry.
- Sweet potatoesSix medium potatoes, pared and parboiled 10 minutes, then halved or quartered lengthwise, will take 30 to 40 minutes at 375F. Start them in the pan before the meat goes in, or they will not be soft when the pork is done.
- How many tenderloinsThe recipe gives no weight. Two tenderloins with six sweet potatoes serves four to six.
Fannie Farmer's book came out of a cooking school that taught economy and system, and this is a school recipe in shape: one pan, one oven, meat and vegetable timed against each other so nothing is wasted and the potatoes take up the drippings. The pairing of pork with sweet potatoes is thoroughly American and older than the book, common wherever hogs were kept and sweet potatoes grew, which is to say much of the South and mid-Atlantic. The long roasting time and the insistence on thorough cooking reflect the period's real anxiety about trichinosis in pork, a worry that shaped American pork cookery for decades and left behind a habit of overcooking that outlived the danger. "Tenderloin" in turn-of-the-century usage meant the same muscle sold under that name today, but from an animal bred for lard rather than lean meat, which is why the recipe assumes there will be something in the pan to baste with.