As usual, Jeffrey Foucault brings some of the best that words can do in his latest newsletter:
You can make Tuscan Chops without fresh sage leaves but you should not. As a river without fish is only water running downhill, the Chops without fresh sage are only pork chops fried with garlic.
But to walk out in the first brisk dusk, a jazz record carrying thinly through the screen door, the grass cold under your bare feet, and to snip the broad, living leaves of sage from the garden, stacking them in your palm like pages of summer, their trichomes standing up in soft and minutely patterned resinous velvet, redolent of so many good things — Artemisia Ludoviciana, the prairie sage you have crinkled into the patch pocket of your snap shirt on rivers across the Mountain West; the pine forests of Northern Wisconsin that you wandered as a boy; the tightly coiled smudge you buy on the road every winter at the little country store in Tesuque, NM, and bring home to consecrate dark mornings by the wood stove — and then to bring the leaves in and toss them into a hot skillet with olive oil and a little butter until they become crisply translucent, small panes of stained glass scattered over a well turned pork chop, with rice and a simple pan sauce. Well, there is grace itself.
We dropped the kid off at college, came home and wept. In the morning we hiked up our pants and started after our work, having our coffee together and convening again in the evenings to make the ritual of supper, and remember the antediluvian pattern of life.
We must have found the recipe in a magazine not long after I moved out here, twenty-odd years ago. But we haven’t looked at it in years, and we’ve deconstructed and elaborated upon whatever it was. The recipe is elementary and like so many of the best, depends more on grammar — time, temperature, order of operations — than on wizardry. The best food is peasant food, older than the Bible, and more forgiving.