Roast Pork
– Interasian Market & Deli –
$13.99 a pound | June 2022
A few months ago, I had the pleasure of a Sunday brunch at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. The brunch was in the low $40s ex-the Crescent City Cooler (fantastic), tip and tax, as I recall. It’s not often I spend at that price point and can still say the meal was a good value. But it was. The portions were colossal. The service was impeccable. The food even tasted pretty good. My friends and I walked out of there stuffed to the gills. I got in my car and drove to Baton Rouge to visit family. My friends walked for miles to feel normal again. They’re probably still walking.
One thing that struck me about the food at Commander’s, a legendary restaurant, was the hoops the chef went to. Nothing I had, save the Creole Bread Pudding Souffle at the end, had fewer than 17 ingredients. Maybe not 17. But I lost count. And it was consistent across the four of us at the table. It was intentional. And it got me to wondering, to be honest, why?
Let’s take the main event as an example: Cochon de Lait Eggs Benedict. Translated, Cochon de Lait means suckling pig. So here’s how it reads on the menu: “16-hour barbeque shoulder of pork over warm buttermilk biscuits, sauce forestiere with roasted mushrooms, caramelized onions and ripped herbs, soft poached hen’s eggs, and housemade tasso hollandaise.” (Semi-colons would’ve been nice, but what you see is most definitely what you get.)
Like, whew. It was an exponential experience. I didn’t know whether to try to get everything on the fork at once, which I assume was the idea, or break it down to its component parts, or somewhere in-between. Do not get me wrong; I liked it. But I’m not sure the ingredients played all that well with each other in the sandbox. Maybe they shouldn’t have been asked to?
Which is a very roundabout way of my expressing my love for the Roast Pork sitting by its lonesome in the warming case at Interasian Market & Deli, a many-aisle packaged-goods emporium sitting on Nolensville Road, too far to walk from downtown (this is Nashville, people, from the front porch, the mailbox is too far to walk), too close to have any reasonable excuse for not going. In addition to the bags of this and that you’d expect to find in an Asian supermarket in America, the cash-register area has some freshly made lunches and such on display for carry-out (there are no tables that I can tell), a pick-up spot for banh mi, and that warming case, which houses the roast pork that is actually the subject of this blog post (believe it or not).
The “Roast Pork” of my youth came in a strong, flexible clear-plastic tube of sorts, courtesy of Boar’s Head, also known as “fresh ham” at New York deli counters. You know what I mean. On a hero roll, with mayo, salt and pepper, perfect. This is not that. Oh no, this is not that.
What this is, is simplicity itself, a 9″-long, 2″-tall, 2″-deep two-hander that looks almost like a giant rib, topped by a crisp, puffed-out seal of skin, with striations of meat and fat, meat and fat, meat and fat. Plus a couple of rib bones embedded at the bottom. The meat is seasoned, far as I can tell, with that Daily Double of salt and pepper, and maybe it has some invisible fairy dust on it, like garlic powder, I don’t know. But it’s not so much about the seasoning as the deep flavor of the meat itself.
Whatever it’s seasoned with (or brined, perhaps?), it works, and when you walk out of the store with this iteration of Roast Pork, it’s debatable whether it will last as far as your car, let alone your house. Because those rib bones at the bottom don’t travel across the entire length of the meat, you can slice half of it up easily, and then eat down to the bones like the caveperson you once were. It’s sold a little warmer than room temperature, but for once, that doesn’t matter, not really. You can eat this cold, warm or hot, there’s no loss of taste, but be forewarned, if you heat it, the fat will render in the oven or microwave enough to make you double your dose of statins. Do you care?