Julia Child’s Côtes de Porc Poêlées – Casserole Sautéed Pork Chops

Julia Child’s Côtes de Porc Poêlées – Casserole Sautéed Pork Chops

Now that it’s autumn again I’ve had an intense desire to get back to cooking with Julia. Nothing says fall to me more than the earthy, robust dishes of French country cooking. Simmering stews, rustic tarts, vegetables roasted slowly in the oven. It’s the kind of cooking best left to a lazy Saturday or Sunday afternoon, when the pressure to get food on the table is not quite what it is during the weekdays. Now, I don’t know about you, but for me those sort of weekends are few and far in between. It seems that weekends have become all about the errands that I have no time to run during the week, not to mention the housework, laundry, and all those little things I have been meaning to get done around the house, like cleaning out my increasingly disorganized pantry.

If you’ve cooked from Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child, as I do when I’m looking for something authentically French, then you know that these are not the type of dishes one can whip up in thirty minutes. They are, however, the kind of dishes that turn out perfectly if you follow directions. How many cookbooks can promise you this? For me MtAoFC has long been the bible of cooking perfection–the cookbook I would choose to have on my shelf if I could only have one.

It took Julia Child ten years to write Volume I, in collaboration with Simone Beck and Louise Bertholle, the two French women with whom Julia ran the Parisian cooking school Les Trois Gourmandes. According to Julia’s biographers, Beck and Bertholle were wonderful, instinctive cooks–meaning they had a tendency to be free and easy with their measuring, which displeased Julia immensely. She worked painstakingly on each recipe, testing and retesting it until she was convinced it could be recreated by the average American housewife. It is this dedication and effort that has made her magnum opus a bestseller almost fifty years since it was published.

So cancel your Saturday night dinner reservations and spend a bit of time in the kitchen with Julia and a glass of wine this weekend. It won’t be as easy as ordering something off a restaurant menu, but I bet it will be a whole lot more satisfying. And probably more delicious.

Julia Child’s Côtes de Porc Poêlées – Casserole Sautéed Pork Chops

Ingredients:

• 6 pork chops cut 1-inch thick
• 3-4 tablespoons pork fat, lard, or cooking oil
• 2 tablespoons butter
• 2 halved cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup dry white wine or beef stock
• salt
• pepper

Method:

1) Preheat oven to 325F. Dry the pork chops on paper towels. Heat the fat or oil in a fireproof casserole dish until it is moderately hot. Brown the chops, 2 or 3 at a time, on each side for about 4 minutes. As they are browned, transfer them to a side dish. Season with salt and pepper.

2) Pour the fat out of the casserole and add the butter and garlic. Return the chops, overlapping slightly. Baste them with butter. Cover and heat the casserole until the meat is sizzling, then set in the lower third of the oven for 25 to 30 minutes. Turn and baste once or twice. The chops are done when the meat juices run clear with no trace of pink.

3) Arrange the chops on a platter. Remove all but 2 tablespoons of liquid/fat from the casserole. Pour in the wine or beef stock and boil rapidly, scraping up the coagulated cooking juices until you have about 1/2 cup of concentrated sauce. Correct seasonings and pour over chops.

These pork chops are delicious served with mashed potatoes and mushrooms or a mushroom sauce.