Home › Sausages › Fried Pork Chops
Fried Pork Chops
Get 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 sautepan; 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 plain sauté of chops from an era when pork was cooked hard by necessity. The method is sound; the timing is not.
- The timing is the thingTwenty minutes for a half-inch chop will give you grey, dry meat. Modern pork is safe at 145F internal with a three-minute rest, which on a chop this thin means roughly three to four minutes a side over medium-high heat.
- Why the old rule existedTrichinella was a genuine risk in nineteenth-century pork, and long cooking of pork until no trace of pink remained was the general rule of the period. Commercial pork today carries a negligible risk, and the USDA lowered its recommended temperature for whole cuts to 145F in 2011.
- Butter alone will burnAn ounce of butter over the heat needed to brown a chop will blacken before the meat colours. Add a spoonful of neutral oil, or brown the chops in oil and swirl in the butter at the end to baste.
- SautepanMeans a straight-sided frying pan, not a saucepan. Any heavy skillet works; cast iron gives the best crust. Do not crowd it, or the chops steam.
- Robert sauceA classic French brown sauce built on onion, white wine, stock and mustard, sharpened with vinegar. Piquant sauce is its close relative, with chopped gherkins and herbs. Neither is sold ready-made in most shops now; apple sauce is the easy substitute the recipe already offers.
- Salt earlier if you canSalting both sides half an hour ahead rather than at the pan seasons the meat more evenly and may help it hold moisture. Pat the surface dry before the chops go in.
- SagePowdered sage is stronger and more musty than the rubbed or fresh leaf. A pinch is plenty; scatter it in the last minute so it warms in the fat rather than scorching.
- YieldThe recipe states no quantity; reckon one chop per person, two for large appetites, and sauce to suit.
Pork chops fried in butter and sent to table with a sharp brown sauce is a thoroughly Anglo-French arrangement: the cooking is English chophouse, the sauces are from the standard French repertoire that filtered into English and American household manuals through the second half of the nineteenth century. Sauce Robert is one of the oldest named sauces in French cookery, appearing in print well before Careme codified the brown-sauce family, and its mustard-and-onion sharpness does the same job as the apple sauce offered beside it, cutting the fat of the pork.