Embellishing porketta

When my husband Yani’s fishing buddies, Joe and Aldo, discovered I was interested in finding the origin of porketta, they wasted no time telling me they knew everything there was to know about the dish.

Predictably, each had his own version of the story, and since I’d heard plenty of Joe and Aldo fish stories over the years, I saw no reason to think either of them knew a thing about porketta. In fact, in my opinion, one was a bigger fabricator of facts than the other, which I, for my part, wasted no time saying to them. Rather than take offense at this blunt but undeniable truism, they seemed to think I’d paid them both a huge compliment, and thus encouraged, they blithely proceeded to enlighten me.

Joe maintained that the dish is rightly called porkette and was invented some time ago by a young Polish immigrant named Pavlos, who found himself working for a shrewd and overly thrifty Italian butcher named Alphonse. Alphonse only let his underpaid employees take home whatever meat ended up being unsellable, so the enterprising Pavlos invented the pepper-crusted pork loin thinking that, thus altered, the meat wouldn’t sell. It did, of course. It sold so well that Alphonse ended up becoming quite wealthy as a result of the dish’s immense and immediate popularity, none of which he apparently passed on to young Pavlos.

Now Alphonse, it seemed, had a daughter....At this point Aldo cut in to insist the young immigrant was the Italian inventor of the recipe, that it was rightly called porketta and that the owner of the butchery was a despicable old Pole named Pavlos. I could see this was going to be one of their epic, circuitous and probably risqué stories having nothing at all to do with porketta.

Whether you call it porkette or porketta and consider it Italian or Polish, you’ll have to agree this unique and inspired pairing of pork and pepper is the work of genius.

Porketta

Ingredients

2 1/2–3 lb. boneless pork loin roast

1/2 oz. dill finely chopped, fresh or frozen

1 oz. fresh coarse ground, black pepper

1 1/2 tsps. salt

1 tbsp. onion powder

1 tsp. garlic powder

2 tbsp. vegetable oil

3 cups water

Method

Mix together dill, pepper, salt, onion powder, garlic powder and vegetable oil. Cover the entire pork roast with the mixture. Wrap or cover and refrigerate six to 12 hours or overnight. Remove from refrigerator an hour or so before you plan to put it into the oven. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place roast in an appropriately sized pan. Add two cups water to pan, cover and cook one hour. Add one more cup of water, re-cover and continue to cook until done. Serve sliced fairly thin with fresh, chilled cucumber wedges on the side and juice from the pan drizzled over meat.