Pork Milanese with Samphire, Egg and Tomato and Anchovy dressing

A Seasonal Supper for August using everyones favourite salty sea vegetable

Samphire is kind of a miraculous thing, really. It’s already perfectly seasoned, quick to cook, nutritious and very delicious plus it grows very romantically by the sea so I always feel extra wholesome eating it. It’s at its very best and most abundant here in the UK now in late summer and is much more widely available than ever before. Most good fishmongers and greengrocers will stock it, but I have also seen it on the shelves in Waitrose, Sainsburys and on Ocado.

Samphire is a sea vegetable that looks like baby asparagus but more floppy. It is inherently salty because it grows so close to the sea on marshland and just soaks up all that goodness from the water. It is rich in Vitamin A, calcium and iron and, look, I don’t really talk about nutritionally dense things on here because it’s not what we are here for BUT I do like to know when something I like is good for me because then I can eat more of it. And I LOVE samphire.

Today it’s employed as a garnish, fried in the same pan as an egg where it becomes a sort of frilly, salty green fringe. Other days I might whip it through a pan of spaghetti aglio e olio, or use it to bulk out a puy lentil salad. It works both as a vegetable and a seasoning, which is just bloody handy. Anyway, back to this recipe. A luscious, tender pork chop milanese is topped with said samphire-fried-egg and a gloriously savoury tomato and anchovy dressing. It’s a riff on a schnitzel I suppose, with the egg and the anchovy, but with hints of Italy in there too from the dressing. I hope you love it!

PORK MILANESE WITH SAMPHIRE, EGG AND TOMATO AND ANCHOVY DRESSING

For the Pork