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Baked Pork Chops
Use as many pork chops and potatoes as needed. Slice potatoes and place in baking dish, place chops on top and season with salt and pepper. Cover with milk and bake until potatoes are cooked-about one-half hour. Turn pork chops occasionally so they will brown nicely on both sides.
Mrs. Dean Bennett.
A one-dish scalloped-potato supper of the kind community cookbooks printed by the dozen, with no oven setting and no quantities. Two things need fixing: the temperature and the time.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A moderate oven, 350F, is right for this; anything hotter and the milk scorches at the edges before the potatoes give way.
- The half hour is wrongSliced raw potatoes in milk need 60 to 75 minutes at 350F, covered for the first 40 or so, before they are tender. Thirty minutes leaves them crunchy and the pork underdone. Test with a knife tip in the center of the dish, not the edge.
- Slice thicknessCut the potatoes about 1/8 inch — a mandoline or steady knife work. Uneven slices are the usual reason half the dish is soft and half is raw.
- Pork donenessModern chops are leaner than the pork of a century ago and cook to 145F with a three-minute rest. Older practice took pork well past that, to 160-170F, which may be why the original assumes the meat can sit in the oven as long as the potatoes need. Use a thermometer; bone-in chops around 3/4 inch are the most forgiving here.
- Keeping the milk from breakingWhole milk at 350F may curdle around the chops. Use enough to come partway up the potatoes rather than "cover" them, or substitute half-and-half, which holds together better.
- Turning the chopsTurning them mid-bake, as directed, works but disturbs the potatoes. Searing the chops in a skillet first gives better color and lets you leave the dish alone.
- QuantityOne chop and one medium potato per person. Four chops and four or five potatoes fill a 9x13 dish and serve four.
This is a church-supper dish in its purest form: no measurements, no oven setting, and the assumption that anyone reading it has made scalloped potatoes often enough not to need telling. Baking sliced potatoes in milk is an old European habit that arrived in American kitchens as "scalloped" potatoes -- the word is often traced to collop, a thin slice of meat, though it is just as often derived from the scallop shell in which such dishes were baked; by the nineteenth century it had come to mean anything sliced and baked in a creamy sauce. Setting chops directly on top turns a side dish into a whole meal in one pan. Contributor-signed recipes like Mrs. Dean Bennett's were standard currency in American congregational fundraising cookbooks from the later nineteenth century onward; the books were sold to finance a building fund or a mission, and the recipes were transcribed largely as their donors gave them, brevity and all.