Weeknight Cooking

"The Irish prefer them, evidently, to starvation, and the English, too.  And in mid-western Europe, in a part where dumplings grow on every kitchen-range, there are great cannon balls of them, pernicious as any shrapnel to a foreign plate, but swallowed like feathery egg-whites by the natives."
      –M.F.K. Fisher, from "Let the Sky Rain Potatoes"



Potato Pork Chop Casserole

For every golden moment in cooking, for every slight dash of salt that stirs flavor in the right spot at the right time, for every perfect recipe chosen to suit its audience, there is a dud.  The chef, I assume, will assuredly take his or her duds very seriously for there is a waiting, paying mouth at the other end of the fork, but fortunately, for the simple home cook, a dud a week can be handled without any more major repercussion than a snide remark or a boycott by the children (usually quickly followed up by snacks and sweets from the pantry that seem to satisfy every time).

If I remember correctly, an early-week golden moment here at home was a pureed white bean soup with ham and bacon. Later that week, though, the potato pork chop casserole tasted (so I've heard) and felt like the worn rubber toys of a teething puppy dog.

M.F.K. Fisher, the great culinary writer of last century, gives us a good run-down of the potato and helps me, the home cook of a dud, to

understand better why you don't build an entire entree out of a potato.  She comes around to say that when it comes to potatoes, "Although there are few ways of preparing [them] to approach the perfection of a royal plate of fish, and none I know of to make them worth the compliment of a bottle of Chateau Yquuem, they in their own way are superlative compliments." This is her way of saying potatoes make great sides like hash browns, bakers, au gratins, scalloped, mashed, or the most common, fried.  My own recipe called for four tubers sliced thinly and spread out along a baking pan, then covered by onion, a couple of hands full of mushrooms, some milk, sage, then topped by the pork chops, to be placed in the oven uncovered for some 45 minutes.  45 can be a long time to wait in our house once the witching hour of hunger hits.  I sped up the process by trying to broil this pan of duds but what I got, rushed, was a brown crisp edge to the too thick pork chop while the too thickly sliced potatoes below had not received enough slow bake time to soften.  Result?  From another quote from the article, this one by a disappointed potato cooking house wife of yesteryear, "Never have I tasted such a poor, flaccid, grey sad mixture of a mess."  My chops were overcooked and chalky; my potatoes like sharp stones repelling all that attempted flavor piled over it.  And the table of mouths, needless to say, got up at once and rushed to the pantry.