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Pork Tenderloin
Tenderloins Barley Flour Milk, Salt, Pepper fry or broil them and season. When done move to platter and make a gravy with a little flour in the hot fat-if not enough fat, add a little butter. Stir until brown; add a little milk; stir until it boils; pour over the tenderloin.
The recipe is written as a shorthand ingredient list followed by a single run of instructions, which is typical of community cookbooks meant for cooks who already knew the dish. The gravy is the part that is actually spelled out; the meat is left to your judgement.
- Reading the ingredient line"Tenderloins Barley Flour Milk, Salt, Pepper" is a list, not a batter. The only use the instructions give the flour is thickening the pan gravy, and the milk belongs to the gravy alone; dredging the meat before frying is a reasonable inference but is not stated.
- Barley flourBarley flour browns faster and tastes nuttier than wheat. Plain all-purpose flour works in its place; if you use barley, expect a softer, slightly grainier gravy and watch it closely in the hot fat.
- Cut the tenderloin downA whole pork tenderloin will not fry evenly. Slice it crosswise into medallions about three-quarters of an inch thick and flatten them lightly.
- DonenessPeriod cooks took pork to grey through, largely out of fear of trichinosis. Current guidance is 145F at the center followed by a three-minute rest, which leaves the medallions faintly pink and far juicier. Medallions of this thickness need roughly three minutes a side in a hot pan.
- BroilingIf you broil rather than fry, skip the dredge — flour scorches under direct heat — and you will have little or no usable rendered fat, so start the roux with butter, as the recipe itself allows.
- Gravy proportionsFor four servings, use about two tablespoons of fat, two tablespoons of flour cooked until it smells toasted and turns tan, then a cup of milk added gradually. Bring it to a full boil to lose the raw-flour taste, then season; the recipe salts the meat but not the sauce.
- YieldOne pork tenderloin of about a pound serves three to four with the gravy, potatoes and a vegetable.
Pork tenderloin dredged in flour, fried and finished with a milk gravy is farmhouse cooking from the American pork belt, and it appears in bridal and community cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The milk gravy is the tell: it is the same technique as chicken-fried steak and sausage gravy, a way of turning the browned residue in the skillet into a sauce with what was already in the house rather than with stock or wine. Barley flour turns up in these books more often than modern readers expect einforced by the wheat-saving habits documented during the First World War. The recipe's brevity is itself period evidence: a book like this assumed the reader knew how hot the pan should be and how the meat should look, and printed only the part that could be forgotten.