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Pork Chops

Pork chops cooked in butter, seasoned with pepper and sea salt, finished with a lime gravy and served with apple sauce or apricot jam.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Pepper and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,491 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Pork Chops

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the chops

  1. Rub the bottom of a frying pan with a little butter.

  2. Lay in the pork chops and cover the pan.

  3. Cook over low heat, turning occasionally, for 20 minutes.

  4. Remove the cover to brown the chops; cook for a total of 30 minutes until thoroughly cooked and white all through.

Make the gravy and serve

  1. Place the chops on a dish.

  2. Pour off excess fat and make a little gravy with flour, pepper, salt, and lime juice.

  3. Serve with apple sauce or apricot jam.

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. Pepper + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,491 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Pork + appletop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,581 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

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

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

  5. Butter + appletop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,706 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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 protein, which cooks through and turns white when fully done.
Butter
Adds fat to the pan so the chops start to brown without sticking.
Flour
Thickens the pan juices and fat into a light gravy.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the gravy and balances the richness of the pork.

The step that matters

Cook until thoroughly done. Pork must be cooked all the way through to be safe, and the chops should turn white at the centre. Cooking over low heat with the lid on first keeps the meat from drying out before the final browning.

Swap the apple

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

  1. Avocadofits better
  2. Lemonfits better
  3. Mangofits better
  4. Applethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against pork, butter, flour, pepper, lime. 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.

More pork chops recipes

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