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Pork Chops with Puree of Chicory
Neatly trim and flatten six tender pork chops. Season with teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper. Thoroughly heat one tablespoon lard in a sautoire, place the chops in one beside another, gently fry for seven minutes on each side, dress a puree of chicory on a hot dish and arrange the chops around. Remove all fat from pan, pour in a half gill each white wine and tomato sauce, boil for three minutes, pour sauce over chops and serve.
A straightforward sauté with a pan sauce, written in the French-inflected shorthand of professional kitchens around 1900. The only real decisions are what "chicory" means and how long the chops actually need.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold the chops in a single layer without crowding. Any heavy skillet works; the point is surface area, since chops stacked or touching will steam rather than brown.
- Half a gillA gill is a quarter pint: 2 fl oz by American measure (a quarter cup), 2.5 fl oz if the imperial pint is meant. Half a gill each of wine and tomato sauce is therefore roughly half a cup of liquid in total, reduced for three minutes, which yields a spoonful or two per chop rather than a pool.
- ChicoryThe word is ambiguous in books of this vintage. In French usage 'chicoree' is curly endive or escarole, and the classical puree de chicoree is made from those; Belgian endive (witloof, French 'endive') is a possible but less likely reading. Either way the leaf is blanched, braised until tender, then mashed or sieved. The roasted chicory root sold as a coffee substitute is not what is meant.
- TimingSeven minutes a side suits the thin, well-flattened chops of the period. A modern 1-inch bone-in chop wants roughly 4-5 minutes a side over medium-high heat, and a thick one is better finished in a 375F oven. Cook to 145F at the centre and rest three minutes; fourteen minutes of pan time will leave a contemporary chop dry.
- FlatteningPounding the chops to an even thickness is doing real work here — it is what makes a single timing apply to all six and what lets them cook through in the pan without the exterior overcooking.
- Tomato sauceThis means the classical cooked tomato sauce of the period — tomatoes, stock, aromatics, often thickened with a light roux — not ketchup and not a jarred pasta sauce. A few tablespoons of plain reduced tomato passata with a knob of butter stirred in at the end is closer in spirit.
- Degreasing"Remove all fat from pan" means pour off the lard but keep the browned residue stuck to the bottom; the wine is there to dissolve it. Scrape while it boils or the flavour stays welded to the pan.
- YieldSix chops, six servings, with the puree standing in as the vegetable. A starch — potatoes, or bread — is assumed rather than stated.
Presenting meat in a ring around a mounded puree is a common dressing style in hotel and restaurant cooking in the decades either side of 1900, and this recipe reads as a kitchen-line instruction more than a domestic one: the chops are trimmed and flattened for uniformity, and the sauce is built in the same pan in three minutes. If the chicory here is witloof, it was then a comparatively new commercial crop, generally traced to Brussels growers in the mid-nineteenth century, forced in the dark to keep the leaves pale and mild. Lard rather than butter as the frying medium is unremarkable for pork in this period.