No. 1780

Pork Cutlets with Cooked Fine Herbs

Cotelettes de Porc aux Fines Herbes Cuites

After the cutlets have been pared and seasoned, fry them very slowly in butter turning them over when a fine color on one side; fourteen minutes will suffice to cook them. Lay the cutlets on a dish, keep it warm while detaching the glaze in the pan with a little gravy (No. 404), and reducing it with some half-glaze sauce (No. 413); add cooked fine herbs (No. 385), and lemon juice, then pour the whole over the cutlets; trim the handle bones with paper frills (No. 10), and serve.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes in cross-references; the dish is simple once the numbered components are translated. Everything hinges on cooking the chops slowly enough in butter that the fond in the pan is deep brown rather than scorched, since that fond is the sauce.

"Cooked fine herbs" (No. 385)Not fresh chopped herbs. Ranhofer's fines herbes cuites is a duxelles-style mixture along the lines of finely chopped mushrooms and shallots sweated in butter with parsley, moistened and reduced dry; check No. 385 for his own proportions and liquid. About 3 to 4 tablespoons will serve four cutlets.
Half-glaze (No. 413)Demi-glace: brown sauce reduced with stock until it coats a spoon. A few tablespoons of reduced veal or beef stock, or a good commercial demi-glace, stands in without embarrassment.
Gravy (No. 404)In The Epicurean this is plain brown stock, not a thickened American gravy. Use it only to deglaze, a couple of tablespoons at most.
Fourteen minutes, and the cutlet it assumesThat timing suits a rib chop cut roughly half an inch thick from the loin, cooked over low heat. Modern pork is leaner and is safe at 145F internal with a short rest; a thick 1-inch chop will need longer than fourteen minutes, and a thin one considerably less. Go by temperature, not the clock.
"Pared"Trim the chop of excess fat, scrape the rib bone clean of meat and membrane for an inch or two, and flatten the meat lightly so it cooks evenly.
Butter over low heatWhole butter fried slowly for a quarter of an hour will darken. Clarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, gives the same flavor without the milk solids burning into the fond you want to deglaze.
Lemon at the endAdd the juice off the heat, after the sauce is reduced. Boiling it flattens the acidity that the mushroom and demi-glace need to cut through the butter.
Paper frillsPurely decorative cuffs for the rib bones, standard in nineteenth-century service. Omitting them changes nothing on the plate.
YieldOne cutlet per person as part of a larger menu, two as a main course; scale the sauce so each chop gets a spoonful or two, not a pool.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer ran the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is organized less as a cookbook than as a professional reference, with dishes built by pointing to numbered mother sauces and garnishes elsewhere in the book. This is why a two-sentence recipe carries four cross-references: the cook was expected to have gravy, half-glaze and cooked fine herbs already standing in the larder. The aux fines herbes family runs through the whole French repertoire, and the "cooked" version is essentially the mushroom-and-shallot preparation generally traced to Duxelles and named for the seventeenth-century marquis of that title, though Ranhofer's formula is his own. Pork occupies a modest place in the book compared with beef, veal and game, and it appears here dressed with the same brown-sauce logic applied to more prestigious meats, which is a fair measure of how a restaurant kitchen of the period made everything on the card look like it belonged there.