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Pork Tenderloin, Piquant Sauce
Split in halves, lengthwise, three medium loins of pork. Heat in a frying pan one tablespoon butter, add the filets. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper, and fry for five minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish. Pour a hot piquant sauce over the loins and serve.
A four-line entry that assumes you already have a sauce piquante on the stove. The work is in the sauce, not the meat.
- "Loins" means tenderloinsThe recipe itself calls them "filets" and the title says tenderloin. Pork tenderloins run roughly 3/4 to 1 lb each; split lengthwise, three of them give six flat pieces. The recipe states no yield.
- Butter for three tenderloinsOne tablespoon in the pan is thin coverage for six pieces of meat. Use two, or add a spoonful of neutral oil so the butter does not blacken during ten minutes over the heat.
- Sear in batchesSix half-tenderloins crowded into one frying pan will steam rather than brown, and the browning is what the piquant sauce is built to cut. Work in two pans or two rounds.
- Five minutes a side is about right, but checkSplit tenderloin cooks quickly. Current guidance puts pork at 145F internal with a short rest, which for pieces this thin arrives at roughly four to six minutes a side over medium-high heat. The older habit of cooking pork to grey firmness came from fear of trichinosis, now rare in commercial pork.
- White pepper is deliberateIt keeps black flecks off pale meat and pale sauce. Black pepper works and tastes slightly sharper; nothing is lost but the appearance.
- The piquant sauceIn a book of this vintage that means a brown sauce or demi-glace reduced with shallots, white wine and vinegar, finished with chopped cornichons or capers and a little parsley. Have it hot and ready before the meat goes into the pan, and deglaze the frying pan into it.
- Salt quantityA full teaspoon of salt plus a seasoned brown sauce can read as salty. Season the meat lightly and correct the sauce at the end.
- ServingFan the pieces on a warmed platter and nap with sauce rather than flooding it, so the crust survives the trip to the table.
Sauce piquante is one of the small brown sauces codified in nineteenth-century French professional cooking: a brown base sharpened with vinegar and shallot and studded with gherkins, meant specifically for pork, boiled beef and reheated meats whose fat needs cutting. Recipes of this sort travelled into English-language books as compact entries that presume the reader can turn to the sauce chapter, which is why a page like this gives a few short lines to the meat and none to the thing that makes the dish. Pork tenderloin was a natural match: cheap, quick-cooking and, in an era when pork was cooked hard for safety, badly in need of something acidic alongside it. The International Cook Book gathers such dishes under what looks like a survey-of-nations framing of a kind often said to have been fashionable in the early twentieth century, when American home cooks were, by most accounts, being introduced to restaurant French technique in domestic-scale portions.