Karbonade (Dutch Pork Chop with Onion Jus)

In my grandmother's second notebook, the karbonade gets almost no room. Zout, peper, boter, wachten: salt, pepper, butter, wait. That is not poverty of imagination. It is confidence. The Dutch family table has many dishes like this, too ordinary to boast and too useful to disappear, the pork chop you meet in an eetcafe, the cafe that feeds you properly, and at a Sunday table when someone has remembered to make jus.

The name already tells you why this plain little chop is less plain than people think. Karbonade comes through French carbonnade from the old family of carbon, coal, meat once cooked over glowing coals before our damp Dutch kitchens pulled it indoors and gave it a pan of butter. But let me tell you a secret: the fire did not vanish. It moved into the browning. If you rush that first contact with the pan, you get grey pork and a sad puddle, for obvious reasons. If you wait, the butter and meat leave brown bits behind, and those bits become the sauce.

Hou het altijd simpel, always keep it simple. Choose a bone-in rib or loin chop, salt it before it meets the pan, brown it with patience, then finish it with onions and a spoonful of water or stock so the pan gives back what it took. I prefer to keep it a bit more relaxed, in the Dutch way: potatoes, cabbage or endive beside it, and a kuiltje, a little hollow, in the mash for the jus.