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Pork Chops, with Fried Apples
Lightly flatten six fresh pork chops. Season all round with a teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper. Heat in a frying pan one tablespoon good lard, place the chops in the pan, one beside another, and slowly fry for eight minutes on each side. Remove, dress on a hot dish and keep warm. Peel and core three apples, cut each apple into four even slices; dip in cold milk, slightly roll in flour, plunge in boiling fat and fry for ten minutes. Lift up with a skimmer, thoroughly drain, arrange around the pork chops and serve.
A straightforward chop-and-garnish plate from a chef's book, written when pork was a fattier, tougher animal than the one sold today. The timings are the part that needs rethinking.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockEight minutes a side was sensible for the thick, well-marbled chops of 1906 and for a period when pork was cooked hard against trichinosis. A modern centre-cut chop an inch thick reaches 145F internal in roughly four to five minutes a side; carry it to 160F and it will be dry.
- Chop thicknessThe recipe assumes a fairly thick rib or loin chop. If your chops are thin (half an inch or less), sear them hot and fast rather than frying slowly, or they will be done before they colour.
- "Lightly flatten"A few taps with the flat of a cleaver or the heel of the hand to even the thickness, not a pounded cutlet. The aim is uniform contact with the pan.
- LardThe recipe asks only for 'good lard'; rendered lard is still sold and suits the job, with a smoke point around 370F and a clean flavour. Bacon fat or a neutral oil substitutes without harm; butter alone will brown too fast over the frying time.
- The apples are deep-fried, not pan-fried"Plunge in boiling fat" means a deep pot at about 350-375F. Ten minutes at that heat will collapse the slices into mush; two to three minutes, until the flour coat is set and pale gold, is enough. Firm apples that hold shape — Granny Smith, Braeburn, Northern Spy — work best.
- Milk and flour coatingA thin dip in cold milk followed by a light dusting of flour gives a fragile crust rather than a batter. Shake off the excess and fry immediately; if the coated slices sit, the flour goes pasty.
- White pepperChosen at least partly for appearance on pale meat, a convention long associated with French-trained kitchens. Black pepper will do, though it tastes somewhat different -- more aromatic -- and speckles the chop.
- YieldSix chops and twelve apple slices: six servings as written, with the apples serving as the whole garnish. A green vegetable or potato is assumed to come from elsewhere on the menu.
Pork with fried or stewed apples is a pairing generally traced to central and northern European cooking, where autumn hog slaughter and the apple harvest fell in the same weeks, and it is often said to have reached American tables with immigrant cooks long before it appeared in a book like this one. Its appearance in The International Cook Book — Alexander Filippini's vast 1906 compendium, drawn on decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York — shows a homely dish being tidied into restaurant grammar: the chops flattened for even cooking, the apples cut into four uniform slices, coated, deep-fried and "arranged around" the meat as a formal garnish rather than spooned alongside. The deep-frying is the professional touch; a domestic version of the same dish would more simply cook the apple slices in the pork fat left in the pan.