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Pork Chops, Limburg
Neatly flatten six pared, fresh pork chops. Season with a half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Place two sound, finely minced onions in an earthen baking dish and place the chops over them. Finely slice two medium, raw, peeled potatoes and lay them on top of the chops. Season with two saltspoons each salt and pepper, sprinkle over one teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and a half bean finely chopped garlic. Arrange six thin slices raw ham on top of all, moisten with half pint white wine or cider, tightly cover the pan and set in the oven for fiftyfive minutes. Remove and send to the table in the same dish.
FLAN (CUSTARD) AND APRICOTS Roll out on a lightly floured table a half-pound pie paste and with it line a deep pie plate; trim all around the edges, line the inside with a piece of paper, fill up with dried beans and set in the oven for fifteen minutes. Remove, take up the beans and paper. Open a pint can apricots, place on a plate and the syrup in a small saucepan. Sprinkle two ounces sugar over the apricots, pour in two tablespoons maraschino, turn the apricots into the seasoning, then place in the flan (custard) cut side downward and set in the oven for ten minutes. Remove, add three tablespoons currant jelly to the syrup in the pan, with two tablespoons kirsch. Mix well, let reduce on the fire until well thickened, pour over the apricots, let get cold and serve.
Two dishes are run together on this page: a covered pork-and-potato bake and a blind-baked apricot flan. Both are workable as written once the old measures and the missing oven temperature are pinned down.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the chops take 1/2 tsp salt plus about 1/2 tsp pepper, and the potato layer another 1/2 tsp each.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given for either dish. Treat the covered chops as a moderate oven, 350F, for the full 55 minutes; the blind-baked shell wants 400F for its fifteen minutes, and the filled flan can go back in at 350F.
- "A half bean" of garlic"Bean of garlic" is the phrasing these translated cookbooks use for a clove, probably following the French gousse (a pod). Half a clove, finely chopped, is what is meant, which is restrained by modern taste; a whole clove will not hurt.
- Pared chops"Pared" means trimmed of excess fat and any ragged edge, not skinned. Flattening them slightly with the side of a cleaver keeps the six chops in one even layer so the potatoes above cook at the same rate.
- The dish itselfAn earthen baking dish with a tight lid is the point of the recipe: the wine, the onions and the ham fat steam the chops rather than roast them. Foil crimped over a shallow gratin dish works, but a lidded casserole is closer.
- Raw hamAny dry-cured ham sliced thin, prosciutto or a country ham, laid over the top as a fat cap and seasoning. It is salty, so go lightly on the salt in the seasoning.
- DonenessFifty-five minutes covered at 350F will take modern chops well past the 145F the USDA now considers done, which is the intent here; the dish is meant to be tender and braised, not pink. Thin chops will dry out, so use ones at least an inch thick.
- Flan measuresA half-pound of pie paste lines a 9-inch deep plate. A "pint can" of apricots corresponds to roughly a 15 or 16 oz tin of halves in syrup; drain it and keep the syrup, which becomes the glaze with the currant jelly and kirsch.
- YieldSix chops serve six; the flan cuts into six to eight. The two run together on the page, most likely as parts of the same menu.
Limburg is a name shared by adjoining provinces in Belgium and the Netherlands and by a former duchy in the Meuse region, and this reads as cooking of that borderland: pork, onions, potatoes, cured ham and a splash of wine or cider, built in one earthen dish and carried straight to the table. The apricot flan that follows shows the other face of the same book: canned fruit, two kinds of cherry liqueur and a currant-jelly glaze, the international pastry style of the hotel dining room rather than anything regional at all.