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Casserole of Pork Chops and Corn
6 pork chops 2 C corn 1 C milk ½ t salt 1/4 t pepper 3 eggs 2 T green pepper, finely chopped Drain canned corn and add enough milk to the liquid to make 1 C. Then add corn and remainder of ingredients and stir well. Sear pork chops on both sides, place in casserole or baking dish and cover with corn mixture. Bake in moderate oven 1 hour and 15 minutes. Olga M. Marshall.
Chicago, Ill. "JAZ-BO" 1 lb. pork-½ lb beef (ground) 5 large onions-sliced thick 1 package noodles-(1/2 lb. or so) (drop noodles in salted boiling water 20 minutes) 1 can Campbell's Tomato soup 1 can water 1/ 1/4 or ½ lb. grated American cheese Fry meat and onions in bacon grease until brown. Then mix everything together. Sprinkle part of the cheese over the top. Bake about one-half hour.
Two church-supper casseroles from the same page: a corn-custard baked over seared pork chops, and a ground-meat noodle bake of the tomato-soup school. Both need a little translation.
- The salt is a typo"12 t salt" is a dropped fraction — read it as 1/2 teaspoon, which is right for 2 cups of corn and 3 eggs. Twelve teaspoons would be a quarter cup and inedible.
- Moderate oven350F for the pork chop casserole. The Jaz-bo has no temperature at all; 350F for 30 minutes suits it, since everything in it is already cooked.
- The corn mixture is a custardThree eggs, a cup of liquid and 2 cups corn is a savory corn pudding. It sets by coagulation, so avoid a hot oven; too high a temperature will curdle the eggs and make them weep around the chops.
- Canned corn liquidThe instruction to drain the corn and top up its liquid with milk to make 1 cup assumes a can packed in liquid. Modern vacuum-packed or frozen corn gives little or none; just use 1 cup milk and 2 cups corn.
- Pork donenessSear the chops well, then check at the end — 145F in the thickest part, not touching the bone, with a three-minute rest. Thick bone-in chops under an hour and a quarter of custard will be fully done and then some; thin modern chops may be dry, so buy them thick.
- Noodles for the Jaz-boTwenty minutes in boiling water was written for old-style dried egg noodles. Current noodles are done in 6 to 8 minutes, and they will soften further in the oven, so drain them short of tender.
- Bacon grease and canned soup"Campbell's Tomato soup" here is the condensed can, diluted with the can of water as directed. If you use bacon grease as written, expect a good deal of rendered pork fat as well from 2 1/2 pounds of meat — drain it off before mixing or the dish turns greasy.
- American cheeseIn this period the term was often used for a firm mild cheddar-type cheese for grating rather than the processed slice, though processed cheese was also on sale by then. A medium cheddar is the closer match.
- YieldThe pork chop casserole serves six, one chop each. The Jaz-bo, with two and a half pounds of meat and half a pound of noodles, feeds eight to ten — a covered-dish quantity.
Both dishes are recognizably interwar American church-supper food: one skillet, one baking dish, canned goods doing the work of a sauce. The corn-and-pork casserole belongs to a long line of savory corn puddings, and its egg-and-milk binding is the same principle as a quiche. "Jaz-bo" is the more revealing entry — the word was slang of the 1910s and 1920s, generally traced to the same murky origins as "jazz," and used to mean something lively, showy or thrown together with spirit. Naming a hotdish after it fixes the recipe fairly precisely in time, as does the brand-name condensed soup: Campbell's condensed tomato soup, on the market from the 1890s, became the standard binder for exactly this kind of casserole. One of these recipes was contributed from Chicago, Ill.