Skip to main content
Main

Broiled Pork Chops with Pickle Sauce

Broiled pork chops served with a pickle‑flavored sauce made from vinegar, stock, and pickles or capers.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Broiled Pork Chops with Pickle Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the chops

  1. Clean the pork chops.

  2. Dip each chop in melted butter, then coat with bread crumbs.

Broil the chops

  1. Broil the chops over a clear fire until cooked through.

Make the pickle sauce

  1. In a saucepan, boil the vinegar and stock together.

  2. While boiling, stir in enough cornstarch blended with a little cold stock to thicken the sauce to the consistency of cream.

  3. Stir quickly and boil for 3 minutes.

  4. Add pepper, salt, and chopped pickles or capers to the sauce.

Serve

  1. Pour the sauce over the broiled chops arranged in a circle on a serving plate.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Capers + peppertop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,088 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  3. Pork + breadtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,371 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Pork + buttertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together13,933 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  5. Vinegar + peppertop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,814 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pork chops
Provide the main meat, which cooks through under direct heat.
Melted butter
Carries the bread crumbs and adds fat for richness and browning.
Bread crumbs
Form a coating that browns and crisps on the outside of the chops.
Vinegar
Adds acidity that sharpens the sauce and balances its richness.
Cornstarch
Thickens the sauce to a creamy consistency when boiled.

The step that matters

Thickening the sauce with cornstarch. Cornstarch must be blended with cold stock before it goes into the boiling liquid, otherwise it clumps. It thickens as it boils, so the sauce needs a brief, steady boil to reach full thickness and lose its raw starchy taste.

Swap the capers

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (pork, butter, bread, vinegar, pepper):

  1. Sagefits better
  2. Thymefits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Capersthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, bread, vinegar, pepper. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Brown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesPork CakePork Cake107 recipesRoast PorkRoast Pork82 recipesWhite BreadWhite Bread80 recipes