Unbarbecued Pork Tenderloin

 

Originally this recipe was titled “Pork Tenderloin a la clueless Juive”–that is, pork tenderloin a la clueless Jew–but I worried about offending people, even if the clueless Jew in question is yours truly.

When John and I took up housekeeping together, nay these many years ago, he humbly asked if I might prepare pork chops.  Despite a fairly secular upbringing, my family didn’t eat much pork.  The occasional bacon or package of ham passed through.  But pork chops were something else again.

Given my utter lack of religious inclination–I mean, I’d just moved in with an Irish Catholic–refusal felt hypocritical.  Off to the market I went, where I doubtless fetched the worst possible pork chops.  Once home, I subjected them to the usual treatment: drowning in egg, spackling of fake breadcrumbs, cooking to roof shingles in a flood of cheap olive oil.

As my interest in cooking increased, I felt vaguely guilty about cooking with pork.  There are plenty of Jews like me, people who married out, who don’t keep kosher, yet harbor some weirdness about pork.  I grappled with it even as I cooked with it more and more; it’s pretty much impossible to be serious about French farmhouse cookery, as I was during my thirties, and not use pork.  And here I was, studying Paula Wolfert, Claudia Roden, Nigella Lawson, and Tamasin Day-Lewis–all Jews.  (Yep, even Tamasin.)  It helped that these authors, all of whom I deeply respect,  eat pork.  It helped even more when I read this in David Tanis’s Heart Of The Artichoke:

Sometimes I think I could easily be a vegetarian save for a few small exceptions–like pork, for example.

Then came Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal.  In my next life I would like to write like Tamar Adler. In this life, Tamar, raised an Orthodox Jew, concludes her perfect book with a recipe for Pork Shoulder Braised in Milk, which is ultra treyfe (unfit): meat cooked IN milk!

Alas, wide reading of Jews eating on the dark side would not save me.  Indeed, the road to pork cookery was outright dangerous.

During grad school I took it into my head to attempt a  meatloaf recipe calling for ground beef, ground pork, and catsup.  Assuming the catsup responsible for the meat’s red tint, I served it.  Fortunately, John did not get food poisoning, making him available to drive me to the ER.

In my late thirties I finally got braces.  One Saturday I was lunching on a meaty pork chop bone. All that indelicate gnawing knocked a bracket loose.  The emergency duty orthodontist was Jewish.

“What happened?” he asked.

I hemmed and hawed, mortified.

“No, tell me!”

“I was eating a pork chop.  God is punishing me!”

Thankfully, he found this funny.

My final run-in with pork isn’t as amusing.  One morning, after frying John some bacon, I stupidly decided to pour the hot fat into a plastic yogurt carton.  The fat melted the carton, spilling over my left ring finger, leaving a third-degree burn.

A smarter woman would have abandoned pork by now.  Me? I have a recipe for you.

Next Monday is Labor Day, a holiday whose true meaning–honoring labor–is often forgotten in our joy at a day off.  I’d better not get started on that.  Instead, this pork.

Have you ever noticed holiday menus always assume people have yards? Not only yards, but big fancy barbecues?

As it happens, we do have a yard. Until two weeks ago, though, it lacked a wheelchair ramp, meaning we never used it.  John couldn’t get back there.  We are now the pleased if financially dented owners of a custom wheelchair ramp, allowing us to enjoy what is, for the Bay Area, a reasonable yard. (Read: handkerchief.)  The barbecue will have to wait.

Happily, this recipe, rechristened Unbarbecued Pork Tenderloin, requires neither wheelchair ramp, yard, nor barbecue.  Nor do you need to be a Jew avoiding being struck down by malevolent spirits.