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Pork with Fried Apples
Cut cold roast pork into small pieces. Thin the left-over gravy with a little hot water, adding seasoning, if necessary. Let it boil for a few minutes in a frying-pan. Add the meat, heat thoroughly, but do not allow the sauce to boil.
Serve with apples prepared as follows: Core three or four Baldwin apples without removing the skin.
Cut into slices half an inch thick, and cook in hot bacon fat until soft and well browned. Drain on soft paper. Or the pork may be sliced and served cold, and the apples used as a border.
A Scallop of Roast Pork and Cabbage 2 cups thinly slivered 1½ cups cooked choppork ped cabbage I I ½ cups white sauce No. 2 (see page 68) Season pork with salt and pepper. In a bakingdish arrange layers of pork, cabbage, and white sauce. Cover with a few well-buttered crumbs. Heat in oven until sauce bubbles through the crumbs.
A straightforward reheat of roast pork, propped up by fried apple rings. The whole dish hinges on warming the meat without cooking it a second time.
- Do not boil the meatCold roast pork simmered in gravy turns dry and stringy within a couple of minutes. Bring the thinned gravy to a boil first, then drop the heat, add the pork, and hold it just below a simmer only until it is hot through.
- Reheating leftovers safelyCooked pork should reach 165F when reheated, which the gravy will manage easily at a bare simmer. If the meat has been in the refrigerator more than three or four days, discard it rather than reheating.
- Baldwin applesA firm, tart New England variety that holds its shape in fat. Braeburn, Northern Spy, Winesap or a firm Granny Smith substitute well; avoid Red Delicious and McIntosh, which collapse.
- Bacon fatRendered bacon fat gives the apples their salt and smoke, and nothing else quite replaces it. Lard plus a pinch of salt is the nearest substitute; butter alone will brown too fast before the slices soften.
- Slice thicknessHalf an inch is deliberate. Thinner rings go to sauce before they brown, and the cores must come out first so each slice holds as a ring.
- The gravyLeft-over roast gravy is usually well salted and stiff with fat when cold. Thin with hot water a spoonful at a time to a pouring consistency and taste before adding more salt.
- White sauce No. 2The numbering refers the reader to page 68, which governs. In many books of this era a second or 'medium' white sauce runs to something like 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour to a cup of milk, but that is an inference, not this book's stated ratio. A medium thickness is what keeps the scalloped version from going watery under the cabbage.
- Oven for the scallopThe original gives no temperature. A moderate oven, 350F, for 25 to 30 minutes will bring the sauce bubbling through the crumbs; finish briefly under the broiler if the top is pale.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Three or four apples and the meat off a modest roast should serve roughly four; the scalloped version, at two cups of pork, is likewise about four servings.
Pork and apples is one of the oldest fixed pairings in northern European cooking, the fruit's acid cutting fat that would otherwise cloy, and American farm kitchens inherited it whole. The Baldwin named here was the dominant commercial apple of the northeastern United States until the severe winter of 1933-34 destroyed much of the crop and growers replaced it largely with McIntosh, which is why the variety reads as obscure now and would have read as ordinary to this book's first readers. The book itself belongs to a genre of thrift cookery aimed at the household with a Sunday roast and six days to account for; the instruction to serve the pork sliced cold with the hot apples as a border is a reminder that a left-over dish was expected to look composed on the plate, not merely used up.