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Hashed Pork
Cut into slices some cold boiled or roast pork and sprinkle with some salt and a small quantity of cayenne; then place in a saucepan over the fire an ounce and a half of butter, a small teaspoonful of mustard, a dessertspoonful of walnut liquor, and a similar quantity of soy or mushroom catsup. Heat the sauce well and put into it the slices of pork and let them get well-heated through and through, but taking good care that the sauce does not come to a boil; lay the pork on a hot dish, squeeze a few drops of lemon juice over the sauce and pour it over the pork, and serve.
A leftovers dish from the Waldorf's kitchen, built on the sharp bottled seasonings a Victorian larder took for granted. Two of them need translating before you start.
- Do not let the sauce boilThis is the hinge of the recipe. Boiling drives off the volatile aromatics in the mustard and catsup and leaves the mustard flatly bitter, and it squeezes already-cooked pork into strings. Keep the pan at a bare shiver.
- Walnut liquorThe dark, spiced pickling liquid from a jar of pickled walnuts, not a nut liqueur. Pickled walnuts are still sold in Britain and by specialty importers; a mixture of Worcestershire sauce and a little of the vinegar from a jar of pickled onions gets close to the same salty-tannic effect.
- Mushroom catsupNot tomato ketchup. Mushroom catsup is a thin, near-black salted mushroom extract, closer to a mushroom soy than to anything in a squeeze bottle. It is still made commercially in small quantities; the recipe's own alternative, soy sauce, is the practical substitute.
- Spoon measuresA dessertspoonful is two teaspoons, so you are adding about 2 tsp walnut liquor and 2 tsp soy or mushroom catsup. An ounce and a half of butter is 3 tablespoons.
- The mustard is ambiguousOscar does not say whether he means dry English mustard powder or a prepared mustard. A small teaspoon of powder would be assertive but in keeping with the cayenne; if you use prepared mustard, slacken the sauce with a spoonful of stock so it does not seize.
- Reheating cold porkSlice thin, no more than about a quarter inch, so the meat comes up to temperature quickly in a sauce that is never allowed to boil. Cooked pork being reheated should reach 165F; thick slabs in a sub-simmering pan will not get there before they dry out.
- YieldThe sauce quantity suits roughly 3/4 to 1 lb of sliced cold pork, serving two to three. Serve on a genuinely hot plate, since the sauce is thin and cools fast.
"Hashed" here means what an older kitchen often meant by it: cold roast meat sliced and revived in a made sauce, rather than chopped into fragments. Recipes of similar shape, with pickled-walnut liquor, mushroom catsup and a squeeze of lemon, are common in nineteenth-century English cookery and were carried into American hotel kitchens more or less intact; Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book contains many such borrowings alongside its Waldorf specialties. The seasonings tell you about the period's larder more than about the pork. Before refrigeration and industrial condiments, a household's savory depth came in part from bottled extracts put up in season and drawn on through the year: mushroom catsup, walnut catsup, and the liquor left in the walnut jar, all of them salty, tannic and dark. Soy sauce appears here as an ordinary alternative rather than an exotic one; it had been reaching British and American kitchens since the eighteenth century through the East India trade. That a hotel of the Waldorf's standing published a dish for using up yesterday's joint is itself worth noting: even a grand kitchen ran on not wasting the roast.