No. 1782

Pork Cutlets with Mashed Potatoes—Hashed

Cotelettes de Porc Hachees a la Puree de Pommes

From the rack of a young pig cut off six cutlets; pare and remove all the meat from the bones, keeping the rib bones for further use. Chop up the meats with half as much cooked udder and add to this hash, a third of its quantity of raw truffles in one-eighth of an inch dice-shaped pieces; season highly and divide the preparation into eight even parts; shape each one similar to a cutlet using the reserved bones for handles, and wrap in squares of "crepinette" or caul fat; dip in beaten eggs, bread-crumb well, and lay them in a sautoir containing melted butter; heat simply to stiffen both sides, then moisten to their heighth with gravy (No. 404); boil the liquid, cover the sautoir and set it in a slack oven for an hour and a half; trim them with paper frills (No. 10). Dress and pour the reduced stock into the bottom of the dish and serve with a vegetable dishful of mashed potatoes (No. 2798).

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's crépinettes are a boned pork rack turned into eight moulded cutlets, each given a rib bone as a handle. Two of the four main ingredients are no longer stocked by ordinary butchers, so read the substitutions before shopping.

Cooked udderBeef or veal udder, poached and pressed, was a standard Escoffier-era enrichment: bland, gelatinous, and used the way a modern forcemeat uses fatback. It is effectively unobtainable now. Half the weight of the lean pork in finely diced fresh pork back fat gives a comparable texture, though not the same silkiness.
Caul fat"Crepinette" here means the lacy caul, the fatty membrane from a pig's abdomen. Order it from a butcher, soak it in tepid salted water to loosen, and spread it flat; a single layer is enough, as it largely renders away during the braise.
Raw trufflesPresumably fresh black truffle, diced at 1/8 inch and added uncooked so it perfumes the forcemeat during the long slow cooking. Preserved truffle in a jar will do; truffle oil is not a substitute.
SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow, that can go from stovetop to oven. Any heavy braiser with a lid works, provided the eight cutlets sit in one layer.
"Slack oven"A cool oven; in period usage roughly 250-300F. The point is a bare tremble in the liquid for the full hour and a half; anything brisker will squeeze the forcemeat and break the crust.
Gravy No. 404Ranhofer's cross-reference is to his gravy recipe, a reduced brown stock. A good unsalted brown stock, reduced until it lightly coats a spoon, stands in. Season the forcemeat firmly but keep the liquid under-salted, since it reduces to a glaze at the end.
Breadcrumb, then braiseThe egg-and-crumb coating is set in butter only until it stiffens, not browned, because the cutlets are then moistened with gravy to their full height and spend the next ninety minutes in the oven. The crumbs will not stay crisp.
Paper frills and yieldFrills are the pleated cuffs slipped over the exposed rib bones at service; purely decorative and optional. Six ribs' worth of meat is stretched to eight cutlets, so plan on eight portions with the mashed potatoes served separately in a vegetable dish, as written.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this dish shows the house style exactly: a rack is boned, rebuilt into a neater version of itself, and given back its own bones as handles. The technique is French charcuterie — a crépinette is by definition a flat forcemeat patty wrapped in caul, and the name is generally traced to crépine, the French word for that lacy membrane. Cooked udder appears through nineteenth-century professional cookery as a forcemeat ingredient, valued as a bland, fatty binder that took seasoning cleanly; it disappeared from Anglo-American kitchens along with most of the offal trade in the twentieth century. The truffle, by contrast, tells you which dining room this was written for: an hour and a half in a slack oven is a long, unhurried piece of cooking that only a brigade with a standing stock pot and a full larder would attempt for eight cutlets.