Home › The World's Kitchen › Pork Cutlets, Van Volkenberg
Pork Cutlets, Van Volkenberg
Procure eight pork chops, remove all meat from bones, then chop it very fine with four peeled, fresh mushrooms, half bean sound garlic, half teaspoon chopped parsley and an ounce cooked, smoked beef tongue. Place this hash in the mortar with an egg yolk, a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper and saltspoon grated nutmeg, then pound to a smooth pulp. Divide preparation in six equal parts, giving nice cutlet forms, detach small rib bones from loin bone, then insert bones in cutlet so as to give a chop-like appearance, dip in beaten egg and lightly turn in bread crumbs.
Thoroughly heat two tablespoons leaf lard in a sautoire, place cutlets in pan one beside another, and briskly cook for three minutes on each side. Remove all fat from pan, pour in one gill tomato sauce, one gill white broth, cover pan and set in oven for forty-five minutes, frequently basting them meanwhile. Remove, prepare a potato puree, dress on a hot dish in pyramid shape, arrange chops around base, skim fat off surface of sauce, strain it over chops and serve.
A Delmonico's-style forcemeat cutlet: the chops are boned, pounded to a paste, reshaped around their own rib bones, browned and then braised. The finished thing is closer to a refined sausage than to a fried chop.
- The hinge: pound it coldThe mixture only holds its cutlet shape if the pork fat stays firm. Chill the chopped meat, mushroom and tongue thoroughly before working it in a mortar (or pulse it in a food processor with the bowl and blade cold), and chill the shaped cutlets again before breading, or they will slump in the pan.
- "Half bean sound garlic""Sound" means firm and unsprouted; the quantity is half a bean-sized piece, i.e. a very small amount — well under a modern clove — finely chopped. Here the garlic reads as a background seasoning rather than a dominant flavour.
- Saltspoons and gillsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon for six cutlets — genuinely hot by present-day palate. A gill is half a cup, so the braise takes half a cup of tomato sauce and half a cup of broth.
- White brothAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock, lightly seasoned. Any good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid dark or heavily reduced stocks, which will muddy the tomato.
- Sautoire and leaf lardA sautoire is a straight-sided sauté pan, wide enough to hold all six cutlets without touching; it goes from stovetop to oven. Leaf lard is the mild kidney fat — rendered lard or clarified butter behaves the same way here.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; the recipe says only "set in oven." A moderate modern oven, around 350F, suits a covered braise of this length. The three minutes a side sears the outside; the long covered braise is what cooks the forcemeat through, as well as tenderising and flavouring it.
- ServingServes six. The potato puree is mounded in the centre of a hot platter with the cutlets leaning around it, sauce strained over the meat only, not the potato.
The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries a name of the kind often said to have come from a patron — hence a pork cutlet bearing a Dutch-American family name like Van Volkenberg, presumably a diner rather than a place. The technique behind it is thoroughly French: the meat is boned, worked to a forcemeat with mushroom, tongue and seasoning, then reassembled around a rib bone so that the plate still reads as a chop. Smoked tongue and chopped mushroom were standard pantry items in a professional larder of the period, and here their job is to season the pale pork from the inside. The pyramid of potato puree with the cutlets ranged around the base is pure hotel-dining-room presentation of the 1900s, when a dish was expected to be built rather than simply plated.