Fillet of pork

OUR LAST-Monday-of-the-month dinner goes well last night, with much good fellowship and conviviality.

My meal, unfortunately, wasn’t quite up to expectations, though: a fried fillet of pork served on a bed of sweet potato.

Part of the trouble is that I’m not that keen on sweet potato, but mainly it’s to do with the fact that my mother used to do fillet of pork – and so good was it, I once told her that this dish alone could have got her a job in any restaurant in Europe! And I still believe that to be true.

It was simply enough done; medallions of pork coated in seasoned breadcrumbs and then partly fried and partly baked until nicely browned. She had the knack of cooking it just right – they were tender, moist and utterly delicious, with just a nice touch of crispness from their coating.

The trouble was, we’d have them regularly, every week, and in those pre-freezer days, we’d have to eat them until they were all gone. So for two or maybe three days we’d be chewing through tenderloin of pork and complaining about it! Can you imagine? Complaining about this caviar of meat cuts because we had too much of it?

But it was the same with a lot of things in those days. Mum’s pea and ham soup, for example – so good, it was to die for. A main course soup with great chunks of vegetables and mouth-filling lumps of ham. But each day my brother and I would come home from school and guess what was for tea! That’s right, still more soup!

So I learned early that you can have too much of a good thing.

Looking back, though, I suppose I know that for some things I was spoiled forever. Soups of one sort or another, roasts – and above all, fillet of pork.