Pork Chops
Wipe chops, sprinkle with salt and pepper, place in a hot frying-pan, and cook slowly until tender, and well browned on each side.
Four lines of instruction that assume a cook already knows what a pork chop should look like coming out of the pan. The gaps worth filling are heat management, doneness, and the fact that modern pork is a different animal.
- The hinge: hot pan, then low heatThe chops go into a pan that is already hot so the surface browns on contact, and only then does the heat come down. Starting cold gives you grey, weeping meat; leaving the heat high the whole time gives you a scorched crust over a raw centre.
- Fat in the panThe original assumes a chop with a good rind of fat that will render out and grease the pan. Supermarket loin chops are lean enough that you will want a teaspoon of neutral oil, or you can stand the chops on their fat edge for a minute first to render some.
- Doneness has moved"Cook slowly until tender" meant cooked through and then some, out of fear of trichinosis. Current USDA guidance for whole cuts of pork is 145F with a three-minute rest, which leaves the centre faintly pink and the meat still juicy. Use a thermometer rather than time.
- Thickness dictates timingA half-inch chop needs roughly 3 to 4 minutes a side; a 1 1/4-inch chop wants 5 to 6 a side over medium-low, or a finish in a 375F oven. Thin chops cannot be cooked slowly without drying out, so buy them thick if you intend to follow this method.
- Salt earlier if you canThe recipe salts at the pan. Salting 40 minutes to overnight ahead, uncovered in the refrigerator, seasons deeper and dries the surface so it browns better.
- The panCast iron or heavy carbon steel holds the heat when cold meat hits it. A thin nonstick pan drops temperature and the chops stew in their own juices.
- Rest and yieldLet them sit three to five minutes off the heat before serving. One chop per person; two if they are the thin cut.
This is the cookery-school register at its most compressed: no quantities, no times, because pork chops were assumed knowledge in an American kitchen of the period. Pork was the cheap, ubiquitous meat, salted and barrelled through the winter in farmhouses and sold fresh from the market in cities. The instruction to cook "slowly until tender" carries the era's real anxiety about pork, which was trichinosis; American cookbooks from this period through the mid-twentieth century pushed pork to a degree of doneness that would now be considered ruinous. Improvements in commercial feeding and inspection have made that caution largely historical, and the USDA lowered its recommended internal temperature for whole cuts to 145F in 2011.