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To Fry Pork
474. Pork chops may be dressed like mutton, being either fried or broiled in the usual way, but they are best fried in the French fashion, when, however, they require a made-gravy. When this is not at hand keep back the last spoonful of the lard, and use this as described at 382, adding a chopped onion and a tea-spoonful of mustard to the flour, and a table-spoonful of Worcestershire sauce or pickle to the water.
A cross-referenced note rather than a standalone recipe: the chops are cooked as for mutton, and the sauce is built in the pan from the frying fat. Everything hinges on not overcooking the meat.
- DonenessPork was customarily cooked until grey throughout in this period, and later Victorian anxiety about trichinosis reinforced the habit. A modern chop is done at 145F/63C at the centre with a short rest, which leaves it faintly pink and considerably juicier.
- "The French fashion"The text does not spell this out. In period English books the phrase is used variously for chops: neatly trimmed and fried gently in fat in a pan rather than seared bare over the fire, sometimes egged and breadcrumbed first. Check the book's mutton chop entry before assuming which is meant.
- "A made-gravy"A made gravy is stock reduced with browned flour and seasonings, prepared in advance rather than got from the pan. Any decent brown stock or veal stock stands in.
- The recipe at 382Not reproduced here, but from what 474 assumes it is a pan gravy made with the reserved spoonful of lard, flour, and water. Cook the flour a full minute or two or the gravy tastes raw and pasty.
- LardRendered pork fat, still sold and worth using here for flavour. Neutral oil or clarified butter will do; the recipe only asks that you keep one spoonful of the frying fat back for the sauce.
- The seasoningsA teaspoon of dry mustard powder goes into the flour, not made mustard, along with the chopped onion, and the tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce goes into the liquid. "Pickle" here probably means the spiced vinegar from a jar of pickles, which does much the same job.
- YieldOne chop per person, 6-8 oz bone-in. The recipe gives no quantities for the flour or the water, so the gravy must be scaled by eye.
The British Cookery Book was compiled by John Henry Walsh in the late 1850s, and its numbered, heavily cross-referenced entries are typical of a period when cookbooks were being reorganised as reference works rather than collections of set pieces: learn the mutton chop, and the pork chop becomes a two-line footnote. The gravy here is a small portrait of the mid-Victorian store cupboard. Worcestershire sauce had been in commercial production by Lea and Perrins since the 1830s and was by this date a standard bottled flavouring in middle-class kitchens, offered casually as an alternative to the vinegar drained off the pickle jar. Mustard with pork is far older than either, and the pairing of the two with a browned-flour gravy points to the same taste that produced sauce Robert in French cookery, which is essentially onion, mustard and something sharp against fatty meat.