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Broiled Pork with Chili Sauce
Prepare the chili sauce before cooking the meat, and in a goodly quantity, as it will keep for a considerable length of time. The cutlets are to be about half an inch in thickness and cut from a leg of fresh pork. Place them between the bars of a double gridiron over a moderate fire and cook them for about twenty minutes. When done, place them on a hot dish, sprinkle over a little salt and pepper, put a little butter over them, and serve with a sauceboatful of chili sauce.
A plain broiled pork cutlet whose only real complication is the timing, which belongs to an era before anyone knew what temperature pork was safe at.
- Cut twenty minutes downA half-inch cutlet over a moderate fire is done in roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side, to an internal 145F with a three-minute rest. Twenty minutes will leave it grey and dry; the long cooking probably reflects the period's wariness about trichinosis, a risk now negligible in commercial pork.
- "Chili sauce" is not hot sauceIn American cookery of the period, chili sauce means a thick spiced tomato relish with onion, vinegar and sugar, closer to a ketchup than to anything from a dropper bottle. The instruction assumes the reader already has a recipe for it to hand.
- Keeping the sauceThe instruction to make a large batch because "it will keep" comes from a time before home preserving was put on a tested footing. Refrigerate it and use it within a couple of weeks, or follow a current tested canning recipe if you want it shelf-stable.
- Cutlets from a legA leg of fresh pork is what a butcher now calls fresh ham. Ask for half-inch leg steaks, or substitute boneless loin chops of the same thickness, which are easier to find and behave the same on the grill.
- The double gridironA hinged wire basket that clamps the meat between two grates and lets you turn everything at once. A modern grill grate does the job; the point is direct radiant heat, not a covered pan.
- A moderate fireFor live coals this means a bed burned down to grey ash with no flame, a medium heat rather than a searing one. On a gas grill, medium. Leg pork is lean, so flare-ups are less of a problem than with chops cut from the shoulder.
- Season after, not beforeOscar salts and butters at the end, on a hot dish. That is deliberate with a thin cutlet on an open fire, though a light salting 40 minutes ahead will season it more evenly if you have the time.
- YieldFigure one to two cutlets per person, and about two tablespoons of sauce each in the sauceboat.
Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name carried the Waldorf's cooking to a general readership in his 1896 Cook Book, was writing at a moment when American "chili sauce" was long since established in the home larder — recipes were already common in cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s: a tomato relish put up in quantity at the end of summer, sweet, vinegary and only mildly spiced, and served with cold meats and chops much as bottled ketchup would be a generation later. Pairing it with broiled fresh pork rather than with ham or bacon is the more interesting choice, since fresh pork was still eaten warily in the 1890s and usually cooked to destruction; the twenty-minute broil here may well be a residue of that caution. The double gridiron he specifies was standard equipment in a period when a great deal of hotel and household cooking still happened over coals rather than under a gas broiler.