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Pork Chops and Rice
6 pork chops 7 T rice 1/2 can water 1 can tomato soup Place pork chops in a pan or iron frying pan; salt and pepper. Clean rice, place on top of meat, add water to tomato soup and pour over meat and rice. Cover and bake in a moderate oven about 1/2 hours. Add a little water once in awhile so it won't cook dry. Pork steak can be used in place of chops.
Laura Mae Grummitt.
Note: Mrs. J. Van Every omits the water and places a slice of onion on each chop.
A one-pan condensed-soup casserole of the kind church cookbooks ran by the dozen. It works, but the liquid and the timing both need attention.
- The liquid is the hingeOne can of condensed soup plus half a can of water comes to roughly two cups, which is ample for seven tablespoons of raw rice, but a long covered bake with periodic uncovering loses a good deal of it, which is why the recipe tells you to keep adding water. Adding a little extra at the start and checking once partway through beats opening the oven repeatedly.
- "A moderate oven"350F. Covered, on a low rack.
- "About 1/2 hours"The ungrammatical phrasing suggests a lost numeral, plausibly 1 1/2 hours. Whatever the intended figure, half an hour in a moderate oven will leave raw rice crunchy.
- One canA can of condensed tomato soup in this period was about 10 1/2 to 11 oz, close enough to today's 10.75 oz can. The recipe assumes condensed, not ready-to-serve.
- "Clean rice"Pick the rice over and rinse it in a sieve until the water runs clear. Some rice of the period was coated with talc or glucose, though enriched American rice was often labelled not to be rinsed; with modern rice, rinsing simply keeps the finished dish from going gluey.
- Chop thickness and donenessThin supermarket chops will be dry long before the rice is done. Use chops at least 3/4 inch thick, bone-in if possible, and cook pork to 145F. Ninety minutes at 350F will overshoot that considerably, so accept that this is braised pork rather than a pink-centred chop.
- Worth browning firstThe original puts raw chops straight in the pan. Searing them in the iron skillet before adding rice and soup costs five minutes and gives the dish the only browned flavour it will get.
- YieldSix chops, six servings. Use a pan wide enough to take them in a single layer, a large cast-iron skillet or a 9x13 dish, which matters — stacked chops steam unevenly.
Community cookbooks were one circulation route for the condensed-soup casserole, and this page is a clean specimen: a canned soup doing the work of a sauce, rice as extender, one pan, and a named contributor whose neighbour's variation is printed alongside as a footnote. Condensed tomato soup had been sold in the United States since the turn of the twentieth century, and by the interwar decades manufacturers were actively promoting it as a cooking ingredient rather than a bowl of soup — a campaign these recipes show succeeding. The collection belongs to a fundraising tradition in which recipes were credited to the woman who submitted them, so it doubles as a membership roll; the small dissenting note about onion and no water is exactly the sort of oral correction such books preserved in print.