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Pork Chops with Country Gravy
Bread the pork chops, dipping in egg and finely rolled bread or cracker crumbs. Fry in hot fat until tender, covering the pan after first searing the meat. When done, remove chops to hot platter and keep hot in oven. Make the gravy in the frying pan by adding flour and rubbing it to a paste with the fat, browning it well, and then smoothing it into a nice rich gravy with milk. Season well.
A straightforward breaded chop with a pan gravy. The recipe gives no quantities, so the proportions below are the standard ones for the technique.
- The hinge: sear first, then coverBrown both sides in hot fat over fairly high heat before the lid goes on. If you cover from the start, steam softens the crumb coating and it slides off.
- Chop thickness and doneness3/4 to 1 inch bone-in works best. Cook to 145F internal and rest 3 minutes rather than to "tender" — modern pork is bred much leaner and dries out past that point.
- Breading, done properlyFlour first, then beaten egg, then crumbs. The recipe skips the flour dredge, and without it the egg beads off the wet meat and the coating goes patchy.
- "Finely rolled" crumbsThis means stale bread or crackers crushed with a rolling pin, closer to fine dry breadcrumbs than to panko. Cracker crumbs brown faster and taste saltier, so cut back on seasoning the coating.
- Gravy proportionsFor four chops, use about 2 tablespoons of the pan fat, 2 tablespoons flour, and 1 1/2 cups whole milk. Pour off excess fat first if the pan is swimming.
- "Browning it well"Cook the flour-and-fat paste 2 to 3 minutes until it smells nutty and turns light tan. Add the milk gradually, off the heat at first, whisking each addition smooth before the next, or it will lump.
- SeasoningCountry gravy wants noticeably more salt than seems right, plus a generous quantity of coarse black pepper — that pepper is what distinguishes it from a plain white sauce.
- YieldOn the proportions above, one chop per person with roughly 1/3 cup gravy each; four chops fill a 12-inch skillet without crowding. The recipe itself gives no yield.
White pan gravy built on the drippings of fried meat is one of the durable fixtures of American home cooking, particularly in the South and lower Midwest, where the same flour-fat-milk sequence dresses fried chicken, ham, and biscuits as readily as pork chops. "Country gravy" and "milk gravy" are largely interchangeable names for it; the term generally distinguishes the pale milk-thickened version from a brown gravy made with stock. The page itself says something about how these books worked: the chop and its gravy were assumed knowledge, so the writer records only the sequence of operations and leaves quantities to the cook's judgment.