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To Bread Chops
Have your butcher cut the chops about an inch in thickness. Beat one egg. After freeing the chops from any adhering bits of fat or bone, dip into the egg and then into finely rolled bread crumbs. Bread crumbs are preferable to cracker crumbs, especially if the bread is made from whole wheat, and slices should be dried slowly in the oven before rolling. When breaded, put the chops carefully into a into a in which the fat is sufficiently hot to give off a blue smoke. .
Brown quickly on one side, then on the other, cover and put the frying-pan on the back part of the stove where the chops may cook through slowly.
A straightforward breaded chop, though the original text has a gap where the vessel should be named — it is a heavy frying-pan, as the last sentence confirms. A few conversions and one temperature that matters.
- The missing wordsThe printed line reads "put the chops carefully into a into a in which the fat is sufficiently hot" — evidently a typesetting error in the source. Read it as a heavy skillet or frying-pan; the closing sentence names the frying-pan, and browning-then-covering implies shallow pan-frying rather than deep frying. The depth of fat is not specified.
- "Blue smoke" is hotter than you wantVisible blue smoke means the fat has reached its smoke point and is beginning to break down. Lard and clarified butter of 1911 behaved differently from bottled oils; aim for 350–375F, when a crumb dropped in sizzles immediately, and use a neutral oil with a high smoke point.
- Drying the crumbsSlices dried "slowly in the oven" points to a low oven; around 200–250F is a reasonable modern equivalent, until brittle but not coloured, then rolled or pulsed fine. Whole wheat crumbs tend to brown faster than white, so watch the first side closely.
- Egg washOne beaten egg will coat two or three inch-thick chops; thinning it with a tablespoon of water or milk helps it spread, since undiluted egg sits thick and may slide off during frying.
- "The back part of the stove"On a wood or coal range the rear was the cool zone. On a modern hob, drop to low heat after browning; in a covered pan a one-inch chop needs roughly 8–12 minutes more, turned once.
- Cook to temperature, not to timeThe recipe does not say what kind of chops these are. If pork, current guidance is 145F internal with a three-minute rest — faintly pink at the centre and safe. The long slow finish here reflects an era that cooked pork much further; the covered pan gives tenderness without it.
- Keeping the crustCovering the pan traps steam and softens the coating. Lift the lid for the last two minutes, or transfer the browned chops uncovered to a 325F oven instead.
- YieldFigure one inch-thick chop per person, four chops per large skillet. Crowding drops the fat temperature and the breading turns pale and greasy.
Good Things to Eat (1911) was written by Rufus Estes, who was born enslaved in Tennessee in 1857 and went on to cook for the Pullman Company's private railroad cars and later for the subsidiaries of United States Steel in Chicago. His book is one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American author, and its short, practical entries — the instruction to have the butcher cut the chops to a specified inch, the aside preferring bread crumbs to cracker crumbs — carry the brevity of a working professional, though the book addresses general readers. Breading and pan-frying chops in this way, brown fast then finish gently, appears to have been common American range cookery of the period, and the two-stage method survives essentially unchanged; only the target doneness for pork has moved.