No. 1777

Pork Cutlets half-Glaze and with Apples

Cotelettes de Porc a la Sauce Demi-Glace aux Pommes d'Arbre

Cut off and pare twelve cutlets from two racks of a young pig-they should weigh about five ounces each after being nicely trimmed, range them in a sauteing pan covered with a layer of melted butter, add a bunch of parsley garnished with a clove, thyme, bay leaf, and season with salt and pepper. Pour over half a gill of Madeira wine, cover with buttered paper, put on the lid, and

DIVISION OF PORK (Division du Porc).

A pork is divided in two parts called halves, and each of these in thirteen, making twenty-six in all, exclusive of the head, which forms the twenty-seventh:

1. Feet--(Pieds)

2. Chine--(Echine)

3. Tenderloin--(Filet)

4. Back Fat--(Lard)

5. Shoulder--(Epaule)

6. Ham--(Jambon)

7. Leaf Lard--(Panne)

8. Fore Knuckle--(Jarret de Devant)

9. Hind Knuckle--(Jarret de Derriere)

10. Breast--(Poitrine)

11. Tail--(Queue)

12. Sirloin--(Longe)

13. Neck--(Cou)

The intestines not included in these are composed of:

1. Gut--(Chaudin)

2. Casing--(Menu)

3. Stomach--(Panse)

4. Liver--(Foie)

5. Lights--(Mou)

6. Caul Fat--(Crepine)

7. Crow--(Fraise)

when the liquid reaches boiling point place it in a slack oven so that the chops cook slowly and brown slightly without attaching to the dish; after twenty minutes turn them over. Should the butter become too hot add a little broth (No. 194a) until thoroughly cooked, and when assured of this fact, remove the chops from the fire, drain off the butter and detach the glaze found adhering to the bottom of the dish with a little Madeira wine; now add a pint of espagnole sauce (No. 414), suppress the parsley and drain well the chops, trim their handles and dress. Strain the sauce through a tammy finishing it with a little fresh butter and lemon juice; cover over the chops with half of this sauce, serving the other half in a separate sauce-boat.

With Apples.—Have the cutlets prepared and cooked the same as No. 1777, only garnish around with apples cut in one-quarter of an inch thick slices by two and a half inches in diameter; remove the seeds with an apple corer, fry them in lard and when nearly done sprinkle over some sugar and continue the cooking until they are glazed.

← No. 1776 Pork Cutlets a l'Aurora Pork No. 1778 Pork Cutlets and Chops, Plain and Castillane →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's braise-in-butter method is closer to a slow oven-poach than a pan-fry, and it was written for the fatty, slow-growing pigs of the 1890s. A few adjustments make it work with modern pork.

Ignore the interruptionThe block beginning "DIVISION OF PORK" is a separate reference table that fell into the middle of this entry when the page was set. The recipe runs straight from "put on the lid, and" to "when the liquid reaches boiling point."
Half a gill of MadeiraA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is a scant quarter cup, about 60 ml. The second, smaller pour used to deglaze the pan is left to judgment; two tablespoons is enough to lift the glaze.
A slack ovenSlack means the coolest working heat, roughly 275-300F. The point is that the butter never fries the meat: the cutlets sweat and take on the barest colour.
Modern pork cooks fasterTwelve five-ounce rib cutlets from a young pig would have carried far more fat than today's lean loin. Cook to 145F at the centre and rest; the forty-plus minutes implied here will leave current pork dry and stringy.
EspagnoleHis No. 414 is the classic brown sauce built on a brown roux, mirepoix and veal stock, reduced over hours. A well-reduced dark veal or pork stock, lightly thickened and finished the same way with butter and lemon, stands in without pretending to be the same thing.
Straining through a tammyA tammy was a worsted cloth the sauce was wrung through by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle does the job; strain before the butter and lemon go in, not after.
The applesQuarter-inch rings two and a half inches across mean a firm, broad cooking apple that holds its shape. Fry them in lard, as written, then sugar them only at the end so the sugar caramelises rather than burns into the fat.
YieldTwelve cutlets and a pint of sauce serves six generously, or twelve as one course of a longer menu.

A Little History

This comes from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium he assembled after some three decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it shows the house style plainly: a French title, a numbered cross-reference to a mother sauce made elsewhere in the book, and the assumption that a brigade is standing by to make it. Demi-glace here means espagnole reduced and refined rather than the near-syrup the word suggests today. Pairing pork with apples is far older than the restaurant and is generally traced to the farm calendar of northern Europe, where hogs were killed in autumn as the orchards came in; Ranhofer's contribution is to treat the apples as a formal garnish, cut to a stated diameter and thickness and glazed with sugar so they arrive on the plate looking deliberate. The interpolated butchery table is worth a glance for its own sake, since it lists cuts and offal that a nineteenth-century kitchen bought as a matter of course and that a retail counter no longer carries.