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Pork Chops Stuffed
Remove bones from chops. Put spoonful of poultry dressing on each, roll and pin with toothpicks. Roll in flour and brown. Pour over a sauce made of water, tomatoes and a bit of onion. (A Contributor.)
A terse contributor's note that assumes you already keep poultry dressing on hand and know how long a braise takes. The missing pieces are the stuffing, the liquid quantities and the cooking time.
- "Poultry dressing"The period shorthand for a bread stuffing: stale bread crumbs, chopped onion, butter, sage or poultry seasoning, moistened with a little stock. About a cup total is enough for four chops. Make it fairly dry, or it will slump out of the roll.
- Boning and rollingAsk for loin or shoulder chops cut about 3/4 inch thick, or buy boneless. Butterfly and flatten each one to roughly 1/4 inch so it will actually roll; a chop left at full thickness will only fold. Wooden toothpicks still work, and kitchen twine works better.
- BrowningSeason the flour, shake off the excess, and brown the rolls in a couple of tablespoons of fat in a heavy skillet over medium-high heat, turning to colour all sides. This is for flavour, not for cooking through.
- The sauceFor four chops: about a cup of canned or fresh chopped tomatoes, half a cup of water or stock, and a small onion, finely chopped. It should come partway up the rolls, not submerge them. Salt and pepper are implied and necessary.
- Cooking time and temperatureThe recipe gives neither; cover and simmer gently on the stovetop for 45 minutes to an hour, until the pork is tender and the stuffing hot through. Pork is done at 145F at the centre of the meat, but a stuffed and rolled cut benefits from the longer, slower braise.
- FinishingPull the toothpicks before serving and let the rolls rest a few minutes. If the sauce is thin, lift out the pork and reduce it over higher heat for a minute or two.
- YieldOne roll per person; four chops serve four with mashed potatoes or noodles to catch the sauce.
Church and society cookbooks of this era ran on shared assumptions: a contributor could write "poultry dressing" with no further explanation and expect readers to know what was meant -- a sage-scented bread stuffing. Stuffed and rolled chops belong to a broad family of thrift dishes in which bread extends meat and a tomato sauce extends both, and canned tomatoes were by this period an inexpensive and widely available pantry item in ordinary American kitchens. Philathea classes were young women's Bible-study groups, and the anonymous "(A Contributor.)" tag is characteristic of such compilations.