Home › Dinner › Veal or Pork Chops, Italian
Veal or Pork Chops, Italian
6 good sized veal or pork chops 2 cups canned or fresh mushrooms 2 tablespoons vinegar 1½ cups water 2 cloves Few grains mace 1/2 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons Mazola 1 teaspoon Karo, Blue Label 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/2 cup canned tomato 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice Broil the chops as usual. In the meantime cook the mushrooms five minutes in the vinegar and water with the cloves, mace and salt. Then slice, put in a saucepan with the Mazola and Karo, cook five minutes, add the cornstarch, the tomato, lemon juice and season to taste with salt and pepper. Put the chops on a platter, pour the sauce over and serve with boiled rice.
A branded recipe from a Corn Products Refining Company booklet, which explains why Mazola, Karo and Argo appear where a plain cook would have written oil, syrup and cornstarch. The method is sound but the sauce instructions are compressed to the point of vagueness, and the cornstarch step in particular needs handling.
- Slurry the cornstarchThe text says simply "add the cornstarch" to a hot pan, which will give you lumps. Mix the tablespoon of starch with a little of the cool mushroom cooking liquid or cold water first, then stir it into the simmering sauce and let it come back to a boil for a minute to lose the raw taste.
- Keep the cooking liquidThe recipe never says what to do with the vinegar-and-water the mushrooms poached in, but it is the body of the sauce. Strain it, discard the cloves, and return roughly a cup to the pan with the mushrooms; a tablespoon of starch will not thicken the full cup and a half plus tomato to anything more than a thin gravy.
- The brand namesMazola is corn oil, and any neutral oil works. Argo and Kingsford's are plain cornstarch. Karo Blue Label was the pale, mild grade of the company's corn syrup; use light corn syrup. The single teaspoon is there to round off the vinegar and tomato, not to sweeten.
- Whole spicesTwo cloves and a few grains of mace means whole cloves and a pinch of ground mace or a small blade. Fish the cloves out before saucing. Mace is the lacy aril of nutmeg, milder and less sweet; a scant pinch of grated nutmeg substitutes.
- Pork temperatureBroil pork chops to an internal 145F and rest them three minutes. Advice of the period generally urged cooking pork right through; there is no need now, and chops of the "good size" called for here dry out fast under a broiler.
- MushroomsCanned mushrooms come already cooked, so allow for the shrinkage if substituting fresh. Fresh ones will need only two or three minutes in the acidulated liquid, and slicing them after poaching rather than before, as directed, keeps them from going flabby.
- YieldSix chops with rice serves six, or four generously. The sauce as written is modest; scale it up if you want the rice properly wetted.
This comes from the promotional cookery booklets issued by the Corn Products Refining Company in the early twentieth century, the firm behind Mazola oil, Karo syrup and Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch. Such books were given away or sold cheaply and functioned as extended advertisements, with company products worked into the ingredient lists wherever they could be made to fit, which is why a teaspoon of corn syrup turns up in a savoury mushroom sauce. The dish is "Italian" only in the loose American sense of the period, meaning tomato and mushrooms in the sauce; corn oil in place of butter or lard was the genuinely novel element, Mazola having been introduced in 1911.