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Pork Chops, Piquante Sauce
Pare and flatten nicely six fairly thick, fresh pork chops. Season on both sides with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Keep them on a plate for forty-five minutes or one hour, turning once in a while. Heat one ounce butter in a sautoire. Place in the chops and cook on a brisk fire for seven minutes on each side. Dress the chops on a hot dish, pour a piquante sauce over them and serve.
A plain sauté with the flavour outsourced entirely to the sauce, which the book assumes you can already make. Two things need attention: the pan and the doneness.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wider than a saucepan and shallower than a stockpot. Any heavy skillet that holds six chops without crowding will do; if they touch, cook in two batches or they steam.
- One ounce butterTwo tablespoons. For a brisk fire it will brown fast, so a spoonful of neutral oil alongside it keeps the milk solids from burning before the chops colour.
- "Brisk fire"Medium-high heat, hot enough that the chops sizzle steadily from the moment they land. Not a screaming pan — fourteen minutes total at maximum heat would blacken the exterior.
- Seven minutes a sideLikely written for fattier, thicker chops than are usual now. A modern one-inch loin chop is usually done in four to five minutes a side; pull it at 145F at the centre and rest five minutes. Fourteen minutes of total cooking on today's lean pork gives you something dry.
- The salting restThe forty-five minutes on a plate is a dry brine and worth keeping. Pat the chops dry before they hit the butter or they will not brown.
- White pepperConventional in French kitchens of the period, where white pepper was the default seasoning. Half a teaspoon across six chops is assertive but not excessive; black pepper works if appearance is not a concern.
- Piquante sauceNot supplied here, presumably given elsewhere in the book: a brown sauce or demi-glace sharpened with shallots reduced in vinegar or white wine, finished with chopped gherkins and parsley. A pan sauce built in the same skillet — deglaze with vinegar and stock, add the gherkins off the heat — is the practical substitute.
- YieldSix chops, six servings. The dish wants something starchy and unsauced beside it: boiled potatoes, or plain buttered noodles.
Sauce piquante is one of the classic small sauces of the French repertoire, built on the espagnole-and-vinegar principle that Carême codified and Escoffier tidied: an acid reduction of shallots and vinegar let down with brown sauce, finished with gherkins for bite. It is used with several meats, though pork, whose fat needs cutting, is a frequent partner, and it has long been associated with reheated or leftover meat as well as with fresh chops — the sharpness covers a multitude of sins. What is striking about the entry here is how little the recipe bothers with: season, rest, sauté, sauce. That is the mark of a book written for cooks who already had the sauce chapter memorised, and who understood the chop as a vehicle rather than the point.