No. 1776

Pork Cutlets a l'Aurora

Cotelettes de Porc a l'Aurore

Cut off six covered cutlets from a rack of pork, beat to flatten to half an inch in thickness, then season with salt and pepper; fry them in butter and when done range them on a dish capable of being placed in the oven; cover over with well-seasoned bechamel cream sauce (No. 411) thickened with raw egg-yolks and adding some very finely cut up chives. Press a few hard-boiled egg-yolks through a sieve holding it over the chops, and when the top is well covered, pour on some butter and brown in a brisk oven.

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For the Modern Kitchen

A straightforward pan-fried chop finished under high heat, with the sauce doing all the work. Two things decide the result: the sauce must be thick enough to sit on the meat, and the second cooking must be short.

The cut"Covered cutlets from a rack of pork" means chops cut from the rack with the fat covering and the rib bone left on. Bone-in rib chops, pounded to half an inch, are the modern equivalent; the recipe calls for six.
Don't overcook the porkHalf-inch cutlets in butter need roughly 2-3 minutes a side. Modern pork is safe at 145F with a short rest; nineteenth-century cooks generally took pork much further, for fear of trichinosis. Fry until just done, since the browning in the oven is brief and adds little more cooking.
"Brisk oven"Read this as a hot oven, roughly 425-450F, or the broiler with the dish set a few inches down. The object is a glazed brown top in a few minutes, not further cooking of the meat.
Sauce No. 411Ranhofer's béchamel cream sauce is a milk-and-cream béchamel. Make it thick — nappe consistency, closer to a coating sauce than a pouring one — or it will slide off the cutlets and scorch on the dish.
Raw egg yolks in the sauceBeat the yolks with a little of the hot sauce first, then return them off the heat; two or three yolks to a cup of bechamel is a workable proportion. The sauce must not boil after the yolks go in or it will curdle, and it will set further in the oven.
Chives and sieved yolkAdd the chives at the last moment so they stay green. The hard-boiled yolks are pushed through a fine sieve directly over the dish so they fall as a loose golden dust; pressing them into the sauce instead loses the whole effect.
The butter on topA tablespoon or two of melted butter drizzled over the sieved yolk is what browns and binds the crust. Skip it and the yolk stays powdery and dry.

A Little History

A l'aurore — from the French for dawn — is a nineteenth-century kitchen name for a dish given a rosy or golden surface; in classical usage it usually denotes a bechamel or velouté tinted with tomato, but Charles Ranhofer gets his color here from egg yolks, both beaten raw into the sauce and sieved over the top as a golden crumb. Finishing an already-cooked meat under a coating sauce and browning it hard belongs to the same family as the gratins and sauce Mornay dishes of the period: it let a kitchen cook chops in advance and send them out glazed to order. The Epicurean (1894) records the repertoire Ranhofer ran at Delmonico's in New York across roughly three decades.