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Pork Chops, Mulhouse
Remove the outer leaves from a medium head of white cabbage, cut it in quarters, remove core, and plunge in boiling water for fifteen minutes; remove and drain on a sieve, then chop up with two ounces larding pork, two ounces raw lean ham, one bean garlic, one medium white onion, two branches parsley and one branch chervil. Season with half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and mix well. Place half of cabbage into an earthen casserole. Finely slice three medium, peeled raw potatoes, place half of the potatoes over the cabbage. Season six nicely flattened pork chops with half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper; arrange chops over potatoes, lay balance of potatoes over chops, then rest of the cabbage. Cover cabbage with the larding pork, pour two gills white wine over, tightly cover the casserole, set in a slow oven two hours, remove, take up lard from surface, re-cover, and send to table in same dish.
A layered braise in the Alsatian manner: cabbage, potato and chops sealed in a covered pot and left alone. The hinge is the seal — the dish cooks in its own steam plus a cup of wine, so a tight lid matters more than anything else.
- Two gills of wineA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup (about 240 ml) of dry white wine. Riesling or Sylvaner suits the region; that cup is the entire cooking liquid, so nothing else should be added.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300°F (150°C); a period 'slow oven' covers about 250-325°F. Two hours at that temperature with a tight lid is what breaks the cabbage down and renders the fat through the potatoes.
- Larding porkFresh pork back fat, sold as fatback, or unsmoked salt pork rinsed of its cure. Two ounces goes into the chopped cabbage mixture; the instruction to cover the cabbage with larding pork appears to call for a further quantity in thin slices over the surface. At the end the fat is taken up from the surface.
- One bean garlicOne clove. 'Bean' recurs throughout Filippini's recipes and probably renders the French gousse.
- SaltspoonA quarter teaspoon. Here, of grated nutmeg.
- ChervilRarely stocked fresh outside spring markets. Flat parsley plus a few fennel or tarragon fronds approximates its faint anise note; dried chervil contributes nothing.
- The casseroleAn earthen casserole means a lidded clay pot or a heavy Dutch oven — the vessel it bakes and serves in. Alsatian cooks traditionally sealed the rim with a rope of flour-and-water dough; a sheet of foil under the lid does the same job.
- Flattened chopsThin, pounded chops. Buried under cabbage and potato and braised for two hours, they finish well past pink and fully tender — that is the intent of the dish, not an oversight, and thick modern loin chops will dry out where thin shoulder chops will not.
- YieldSix chops, so six servings, with the cabbage and potato as the entire accompaniment. Nothing else is needed but bread.
Mulhouse sits in southern Alsace, and this dish shares its layered construction with the region's baeckeoffe — the pot of meat and potato that households traditionally carried to the village baker to sit in the cooling bread oven after the morning's loaves came out. The white wine, the nutmeg and the mixture of fresh pork fat with raw ham all point to an Alsatian rather than a plainly French or German dish, which is fitting: when Alexander Filippini compiled The International Cook Book in the first decade of the twentieth century, Mulhouse had been part of the German Empire since 1871 and would not return to France until 1918. Filippini was long of Delmonico's in New York, and many of the book's dishes carry a national or town label like this one.