Pork Chops
Have chops cut not more than a half inch thick. Place them in a hot pan and cook slowly until tender and brown. Serve with fried apples.
Three sentences of instruction that assume a cook who already knows what a pork chop should look like when it is done. The gaps worth filling are the pan, the heat, and the internal temperature.
- Chop thicknessHalf an inch is thinner than most butcher-counter chops today, which run 3/4 to 1 1/4 inches. At half an inch a chop cooks in roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side; a thick modern chop needs a sear and then lower heat, or a few minutes in a 375F oven.
- "Hot pan and cook slowly"Not a contradiction. Preheat cast iron or heavy steel until a drop of water skitters, lay the chops in to take colour, then drop the heat so the interior comes up without the outside hardening.
- No added fatThe recipe calls for none, and hogs of the lard type common before the mid-twentieth century would have yielded chops fatty enough to grease their own pan. Modern loin chops are lean; a thin film of oil or a scrap of trimmed fat rendered first prevents sticking.
- DonenessPeriod practice was to cook pork until grey throughout, a defence against trichinosis. Current guidance is 145F at the centre with a three-minute rest, which leaves the meat faintly pink and considerably juicier.
- Fried applesFirm tart apples — Granny Smith, Braeburn, or a good local keeper — cut in thick rings or wedges and cooked in the pan drippings after the chops come out. Six to eight minutes, turned once, with a spoon of sugar if the apples are sour.
- YieldOne to two chops per person depending on thickness. The recipe scales to whatever fits the pan in a single layer; crowding steams the meat instead of browning it.
Pork chops with fried apples is a long-established pairing in American home cooking, and it belongs to the farm household rather than the restaurant: hogs were the practical meat animal for a family with a smokehouse, and apples were the fruit most likely to still be in the cellar. The telegraphic style here suggests the page is a reminder for someone who has cooked chops a hundred times, not a lesson. The instruction to keep the chops thin and cook them through reflects the era's well-founded caution about undercooked pork; commercial trichinosis control in American herds came later, and the habit of cooking pork grey outlasted the reason for it by decades.