I always want to cook from Richard Olney’s Simple French Food. But I’ve done very little. My attention was drawn to this recipe by Edward Behr in the latest Art of Eating. He writes that he used to cook it a lot, but now “the combination no longer appeals much to me:” pork chops, apples, heavy cream and mustard. This is exactly the kind of combination that appeals to me, so I decided to make it.

Olney prefaces the section on pork by saying that its “somewhat flat, slightly sweetish, fatty and insidious” taste can pall after a while, and goes on to recommend various ways to complicate and cut it – fennel, sage, apples, mustard and other sharp flavors. I wonder if our pork chops in the the US today – even the heritage Berkshire black pig breed that I buy – have as much fat as the traditional French ones that Olney would have been buying in the ’60s and ’70s. Actually, if you click on that link, you’ll see a photo from last February of well marbled chops with thick layers of fat on the outside. More recently, the black pig chops I’ve been getting, even from Ottomanelli, lack the marbling and have only the layer of outside fat.

The recipe is easy. You peel, core and thinly slice apples and bake them for 15 minutes in a glass pan in a 400 degree oven. Meanwhile, brown the chops in butter for 7 or 8 minutes per side, remove them, and place them on top of the cooked apples. Deglaze the pan with 1/4 cup dry white wine, reducing by half, and dribble on top of the chops. Mix one cup of heavy cream with 1/3 cup Dijon mustard, whisking the mustard in bit by bit to taste (I like quite a bit of mustard), and pour on top of the chops, shaking the pan so that it gets down into the apples as well. Return the pan to the oven and bake 15 minutes longer at the same temperature.

The chops were too dry the first time, so I cooked them for slightly less than 15 minutes the second time. This is better, but requires hair trigger timing, since our too-lean pork chops go from too rare to overdone in about 45 seconds. I err on the rare side, though some people might be uncomfortable with that.

The real delight is the apples, soaked in pork juices and the creamy mustard mixture.

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