Pork Chops.—(No. 93.)
Cut the chops about half an inch thick; trim them neatly (few cooks have any idea how much credit they get by this); put a frying-pan on the fire, with a bit of butter; as soon as it is hot, put in your chops, turning them often till brown all over, they will be done enough in about fifteen minutes;[151] take one upon a plate and try it; if done, season it with a little finely-minced onion, powdered sage, and pepper and salt. For gravy and sauce, see Nos. 300, 304, 341, and 356.
Obs. A little powdered sage, &c. strewed over them, will give them a nice relish, or the savoury powder in No. 51, or forcemeat sausages like No. 378.
Do not have them cut too thick, about three chops to an inch and a quarter; trim them neatly, beat them flat, have ready some sweet herbs, or sage and onion chopped fine, put them in a stew-pan with a bit of butter about as big as a walnut, let them have one fry, beat two eggs on a plate with a little salt, add to them the herbs, mix it all well together, dip the chops in one at a time all over, and then with bread-crumbs fry them in hot lard or drippings till they are a light brown.
Obs. Veal, lamb, or mutton chops, are very good dressed in like manner.
To fry fish, see No. 145.
N.B. To fry eggs and omelets, and other things, see No. 545, and the Index.
147-* Mrs. Melroe, in her Economical Cookery, page 7, tells us, she has ascertained from actual experiments, that “the drippings of roast meat, combined with wheat flour, oatmeal, barley, pease, or potato-starch, will make delicious soup, agreeable and savoury to the palate, and nutritive and serviceable to the stomach; and that while a joint is roasting, good soup may be made from the drippings of the FAT, which is the essence of meat, as seeds are of vegetables, and impregnates SOUP with the identical taste of meat.” “Writers on cookery give strict directions to carefully skim off the fat, and in the next sentence order butter (a much more expensive article) to be added: instead of this, when any fat appears at the top of your soup or stew, do not skim it off, but unite it with the broth by means of the vegetable mucilages, flour, oatmeal, ground barley, or potato-starch; when suspended the soup is equally agreeable to the palate nutritive to the stomach,” &c. “Cooks bestow a great deal of pains to make gravies; they stew and boil lean meat for hours, and, after all, their cookery tastes more of pepper and salt than any thing else. If they would add the bulk of a chesnut of solid fat to a common-sized sauce-boatful of gravy, it will give it more sapidity than twenty hours’ stewing lean meat would, unless a larger quantity was used than is warranted by the rules of frugality.” See Nos. 205 and 229. “The experiments of Dr. Stark on the nourishing powers of different substances, go very far to prove that three ounces of the fat of boiled beef are equal to a pound of the lean. Dr. Pages, the traveller, confirms this opinion: ‘Being obliged,’ says he, ‘during the journey from North to South America by land, to live solely on animal food, I experienced the truth of what is observed by hunters, who live solely on animal food, viz. that besides their receiving little nourishment from the leaner parts of it, it soon becomes offensive to the taste; whereas the fat is both more nutritive, and continues to be agreeable to the palate. To many stomachs fat is unpleasant and indigestible, especially when converted into oil by heat; this may be easily prevented, by the simple process of combining the fat completely with water, by the intervention of vegetable mucilage, as in melting butter, by means of flour, the butter and water are united into a homogeneous fluid.’”—From Practical Economy, by a Physician. Callow, 1801. 147-† See note at the foot of No. 201.
BROILING.