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Pork Chops, Fried
Cut two pork chops half an inch in thickness, take off part of the fat, and trim them neatly. Sprinkle them on both sides with a little salt and pepper. Melt an ounce of butter in a saute-pan, put the chops in it, and fry them until they are thoroughly done. If liked, a little powdered sage can be sprinkled over them before serving. Send Robert sauce, apple sauce, or piquant sauce to table in a tureen. Time to fry, twenty minutes--ten minutes on each side.
A two-chop supper from the days when pork was cooked until no pink remained anywhere. The technique is sound; only the timing needs rethinking.
- The timing is the problemTwenty minutes for a half-inch chop will produce something grey and dry. A chop that thin needs roughly three to four minutes per side over medium-high heat, to an internal 145F followed by a short rest. The long fry is in line with the period's habit of cooking pork right through, a caution usually connected with worries about trichinosis.
- ThicknessHalf an inch is thinner than most chops sold now. If yours are an inch or more, sear both sides and finish in a 375F oven so the centre reaches temperature before the outside toughens.
- Saute-panA wide, shallow, straight-sided pan with a flat base -- a modern skillet or frying pan is the same thing for this purpose. The point is contact with the metal, not a covered braise.
- An ounce of butterAbout 2 tablespoons. Butter alone will brown and then burn well before the chops are done; add a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarify the butter first, and keep the heat at medium-high rather than high.
- Trimming the fatTake off "part" of the fat, not all of it. Leave a rim of about a quarter-inch and score it through to the meat in two or three places so it does not contract and buckle the chop in the pan.
- SeasoningSalting both sides just before frying is fine, but 30 to 40 minutes ahead is better still if you have the time -- it seasons further in and helps the surface brown.
- Robert sauceSauce Robert is a brown sauce with onion, white wine or vinegar, and mustard stirred in off the heat; the mustard must not boil or it turns bitter. Piquant sauce is its close relation with chopped gherkins and herbs. Apple sauce is the easiest of the three and needs no explanation.
- SagePowdered dried sage sprinkled on at the end tastes raw and dusty. Add it to the butter for the last minute of frying, or use a few fresh leaves crisped in the fat and scattered over.
- YieldTwo chops, so two servings. Scale the butter by pan size rather than by chop count, and fry in batches -- a crowded pan steams instead of browning.
Cassell's places this among its plainest meat cookery: two chops, a little butter, and a sauce sent separately in a tureen, so the crust did not sit in liquid. The twenty-minute fry is the period's signature. Trichinella in pork was identified in the mid-nineteenth century and the household response, repeated in cookbooks for the better part of a century after, was to cook pork past all doubt; the parasite is destroyed well below the temperature at which a chop dries out, but that was not widely understood in kitchens. The three suggested accompaniments trace two traditions at once -- apple sauce is the English answer to rich pork, while sauce Robert and sauce piquante come from the French repertoire that Cassell's editors were busy naturalising for British cooks, and sauce Robert is old enough that Rabelais is often said to mention it by name in the sixteenth century.