William Brinson for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Susan Brinson.
Wythe Avenue was dark as pitch at night in the early part of the century, Williamsburg empty around it, save for prostitutes working the corners and the occasional carpenter kid slogging home from the L train.
Relish, located in an old boxcar diner on the corner of North Third Street, glowed like a night light in the distance, a Hopper painting reimagined for art-school ectomorphs and rockabilly girls six months out of Oklahoma. There were D.J.'s working as waitresses inside and art curators eating onion rings at the bar. The whole place was bathed in the reflections of red light off chrome, in a perpetual fog of cigarette smoke. Music blared.
The food came to match: blue-plate diner meals run through an ambition machine but priced for the scene. The best was often the pork-chop special, pan-roasted and sweet — if possible better when accompanied by apple fritters and pierogies that nodded to the Poles who lived nearby. A rich cream sauce of brandy and mustard served as gravy. The dish was French without being annoying about it. Hand-rolled Drums came as dessert, with bourbon, until everyone had babies and moved away.
The chef was Josh Cohen, a New York kid. He is now a Brooklyn burgher, with a piece of five bars and restaurants across the skinny-jeaned northern swath of the borough, a dad with a membership in the Greenpoint Chamber of Commerce. Then he was just a talented guy in a dishwasher shirt, ready for service, up for whatever when it was done.
This dish captures that exuberance exactly. Cohen talked it through with me a few times in Brooklyn, in person and over the telephone. We corresponded about it over e-mail. The subject line on one message he sent read, "The Way We Were." Finally he sent me an upside-down PDF file with the recipe on it. I took it into the kitchen and got to work.
The recipe takes a little planning. You want to brine the pork chops for a day or two before you set out to cook. This gives them a juiciness and depth of flavor you are otherwise unlikely to get from a commercially raised hog. (If you have access to a pig raised on acorns and herbs, feel free to cut corners.) And Cohen toasts the spices he uses in his brining liquid before incorporating them. This is very much to the good of the chops and is worth the few extra moments it requires.
After the brining, all that's required is a pot and a couple of big pans, a hot oven and some ice-cold seltzer for the batter on the apple fritters. Cook the apples in their cider bath, then set them aside. Prepare the dry part of the batter. Cook the pork chops, and put them aside to rest. Make the sauce, and put it aside on the stove where it will keep warm. Mix up the batter, and fry the apple fritters. Everything in sequence, calm as you can.
Cohen makes his own pierogies to go with this dish — he grates baked potato and horseradish into a wrapper of won-ton skins, then blanches them in boiling water and finishes the whole thing in brown butter, serving three or four per plate. Home cooks can do the same or achieve similar success with a store-bought version, or simply make the dish with roasted new potatoes drizzled in butter and showered with freshly grated horseradish. (These can cook in the same oven as the pork chops, tossed in olive oil with some chopped shallots and salt and pepper, for about 30 minutes, or until you can easily pierce them with a fork.)
Whichever, the result is a taste of Brooklyn on the cusp of its move into full food mania. This is how to make it in America.
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