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Pork Chops, Savoury
Cut the chops half an inch thick from a good loin of pork; trim them neatly, and sprinkle a little salt and pepper over them. Take a slice of fat bacon, cut it and the trimmings from the chops into small pieces, and put them into a stewpan with a table-spoonful of chopped parsley, half a spoonful of chopped sage, a finelyminced shallot, a salt-spoonful of salt, and half a salt-spoonful of white pepper. Add the chops, cover the saucepan closely, and let them stew gently for twenty minutes. Lift them out, put them on a hot dish, and keep them hot. Pour over the herbs two table-spoonfuls of stock or water and a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Let it boil up, strain it, and skim off the fat. Boil again with a glass of port and serve it round the chops. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. Sufficient, one pound for two or three persons.
A dry braise: the chops cook in their own fat and the rendered bacon, with no liquid added until the pan sauce is made at the end. Low heat and a tight lid are what keep it from turning into a scorched fry.
- The hinge — no liquid, low heatNothing goes into the pan but fat, herbs and meat, so the chops steam in whatever moisture they release. Use the lowest flame that keeps a faint sizzle, a heavy pan, and a lid that seals; if it dries out and the parsley browns, the sauce will taste burnt.
- Chop thickness and timeHalf an inch is thin by current butchery, and twenty minutes covered will take that far past done. Pull them at an internal 145F with a short rest — for half-inch loin chops that is closer to 8-12 minutes. Thicker chops of 1 to 1.5 inches will use something like the original time.
- Salt-spoonfulA salt-spoon holds roughly a quarter teaspoon, so the seasoning here is about 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon white pepper for a pound of meat, on top of the salting of the chops themselves.
- A glass of portA wine glass in this period ran roughly 2 to 4 fluid ounces, and the book does not specify. Start with 2 fl oz for a pound of chops; the sauce is only two tablespoons of stock plus lemon juice, so port dominates it quickly.
- Shallot and sage"Half a spoonful" of chopped sage most likely means half a tablespoonful, taking its sense from the tablespoon of parsley named just before it, though the book leaves the spoon unspecified. "Chopped" implies fresh sage rather than dried; if substituting dried, use roughly a third as much. One small shallot, minced fine, is the intent.
- Skimming mattersBacon plus pork trimmings plus loin fat renders a great deal of grease into a very small quantity of sauce. Strain, let it settle a moment, and skim properly, or you serve a spoonful of fat rather than a glaze.
- YieldThe book's own note stands: one pound of chops for two to three people, which is one chop each by modern portioning. Scale the sauce up if you are cooking four or more — two tablespoons of stock will not stretch.
- "Probable cost, 1s. per pound"A period price, not a measurement. Cassell's gave costs so a household could budget a menu; it has no bearing on the cooking.
Savoury pork chops are cooked covered over gentle heat with fat, herbs and aromatics rather than in liquid, a method that suited a closed range top where a pan could sit at a steady low temperature for a quarter of an hour without attention. The seasoning is the standard English pairing for pork: sage, parsley and shallot, with sage's affinity for pork long established in English cookery through stuffings and sausage. The finish is more ambitious than the body of the dish, a lemon-and-port reduction of the sort Cassell's applied freely to meat and game; a spoonful of fortified wine turned pan drippings into something a household could call a sauce. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled in the late nineteenth century, was arranged alphabetically for exactly this purpose ead look look up chops and find a range of treatments.