No. 1779

Pork Cutlets with Apple Croquettes

Cotelettes de Porc aux Croquettes de Pommes d'Arbre

Prepare and cook the cutlets the same as for cooked fine herbs (No. 1780), trim the handle bones and dress in a circle; fill the center with apple croquettes (No. 3016) in the form of inch balls, and serve separately a brown sauce (No. 414), with essence of ham (No. 390.) To make apple croquettes, mince some apples very small and cook them slowly in fresh butter; when nearly done add a little sugar and finish the cooking. Let this preparation get quite cold, then divide it into small parts of a sufficient size to make inch in diameter balls; roll these in bread-crumbs, beaten eggs and then more bread-crumbs, smooth this over neatly with a knife and fry the croquettes in very hot fat.

← No. 1778 Pork Cutlets and Chops, Plain and Castillane Pork No. 1780 Pork Cutlets with Cooked Fine Herbs →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references, so the page only fully makes sense with three other numbered recipes at hand. What is spelled out here is the apple croquette, and that is the part worth getting right.

"Pommes d'arbre"Literally "tree apples" — Ranhofer distinguishes them from pommes de terre, potatoes, which is what an unqualified pommes would mean on a French menu. These are fruit croquettes served as the garnish inside the ring of cutlets.
The cross-referencesNo. 1780 is the neighbouring recipe, pork cutlets with cooked fine herbs; in this period that generally means a shallot, mushroom and parsley mixture cooked down before the cutlets are finished. No. 414 is Ranhofer's brown sauce, of the espagnole family, and No. 390 his essence of ham, a ham reduction used to sharpen it. A good demi-glace with a spoonful of reduced ham stock stirred in covers both.
Trim the handle bonesThis is frenching: scrape the meat and membrane from the last inch or so of the rib so the bone stands clean. Rib chops cut from a rack take it best; loin chops have no handle to trim.
Pork donenessNineteenth-century practice was to cook pork through and beyond. Current guidance for whole cuts is 145F at the centre with a three-minute rest, which leaves the meat faintly pink and far juicier. Chops of about an inch will need roughly 4 minutes a side in a hot pan.
The apple mixture must be dryThe hinge of the whole dish. Mince firm cooking apples fine and cook them slowly in butter until the moisture has gone and the mass pulls away from the pan; only then add sugar, which will otherwise draw out more liquid and stall the reduction. A wet mixture will not hold a ball and will burst in the fat.
Chilling"Quite cold" means several hours in the refrigerator, ideally overnight. Shape the inch balls, bread them, then chill again for twenty minutes before frying so the crust sets before the interior softens.
"Very hot fat"In modern terms this is usually taken as somewhere around 375F. Lower and the crumbs absorb fat before they colour; much higher and they darken before the centre warms. Fry in small batches, thirty to sixty seconds, and drain on paper.
Dressing and yieldThe cutlets stand in a ring with the croquettes heaped in the middle and the sauce passed at table. Figure one to two chops and three or four croquettes per person; no quantities are given on this page.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchens at Delmonico's in New York for over thirty years, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially the restaurant's working repertory set down in thousands of numbered entries, cross-referenced like an engineering manual because that is how a professional brigade used it. The pairing of pork with apple is older and broader than any one cuisine — it belongs to the agricultural calendar, where pigs were killed in autumn as the orchards came in — but the treatment here is thoroughly French service: the fruit is not spooned alongside as a sauce but reduced, chilled, moulded, crumbed and fried, so it arrives as a crisp sphere that can be dressed inside a ring of frenched cutlets. Croquettes of every description were a mark of the ambitious late-nineteenth-century kitchen, since they demanded a cold larder, a fryer kept at temperature and a cook with time to shape them, and a sweet-savoury one like this shows a house working to distinguish a plain chop.