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Find a favorite page from the past in ‘Best Lost Suppers’

By Kim Davaz

One afternoon in New Jersey, my father, two young cousins and I decided to make rice pudding. It’s hard to find a restaurant or grocery store deli counter in New Jersey that doesn’t offer rice pudding.

I found a recipe for rice pudding in “Cook’s Country Best Lost Suppers” by the editors at America’s Test Kitchen. As written, the recipe was very good, but not quite what we wanted. We made a copy of the page for noting changes as we made them.

It took several batches to get the rice pudding the way we like it, not that we didn’t like eating the batches we would later alter. Our recipe is covered with notes, deletions and additions in all of our different handwriting.

Cook’s Country magazine is part of Cook’s Illustrated magazine, famous for its passion for finding the ultimate version of any recipe. The cooks will make a recipe over and over again to get every little detail just right. While Cook’s Illustrated cookbooks will often go on and on about where the cooks started and how they got to the final recipe, in “Best Lost Suppers” each recipe has a single paragraph at the end explaining the changes made to the original.

Before each recipe, a little story by the recipe contributor offers a history of the dish.

Cynthia Hutchins’ great-grandmother was widowed in 1900 and had to tend four children and a farm in Shelby County, Texas. Hutchins shares Ma Sapp’s recipe for gingerbread, which she makes at Christmas for family and friends.

She writes, “When I am making Ma Sapp’s gingerbread, I can share memories of my own childhood with my grandchildren and remind them of their heritage and the strength of our roots.” What more can you ask of a recipe than that it tastes good and brings people a little bit of their collective past?

These recipes could be a starting point for you to re-create a loved recipe from your own past, be it meat loaf, pasta sauce, chicken and dumplings, tamale pie or shrimp creole. The macaroni and cheese in your mind is probably not the very adult version in the book, flavored with three cheeses, cocktail onions and stuffed green olives, but it could become a new favorite.

The book ends with desserts, including a fruitcake that is about eight pounds of fruit and nuts held together with a richly spiced and spiked batter that I’m planning to bake later this fall for Christmas gifts for people I know love fruitcake.

Cook’s Country magazine says it is dedicated to finding the best methods for preparing everyday American dishes. America is indeed a melting kitchen pot. Some recipes were made by parents or grandparents from the old country, some were inventions of necessity using inexpensive and easily available ingredients and some were generous gifts from friends or neighbors.

However and from whom these recipes were handed down, they represent love, home and comfort to the contributors.

Pork chops with sauerkraut and apples is fall in a baking dish. As much as I like sauerkraut, I’m going to try this some time with shredded cabbage (green or red or a combination of the two) instead of sauerkraut.

Apples and Sauerkraut Pork Chops

• 1 pound sauerkraut, rinsed and drained
• 1 teaspoon caraway seeds, toasted
• 2 pounds Cortland or Empire apples (about 4 apples), cored
• 4 bone-in, blade-cut pork chops, about 10 ounces each, about 1 inch thick, trimmed and sides slit
• Salt and pepper
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
• 2 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh sage
• 2 teaspoons minced fresh thyme
• 1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1/4 cup apple cider
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar

Adjust an oven rack to the lower-middle position and heat the oven to 325 degrees.

Spread the sauerkraut evenly across the bottom of a 13-by-9-inch baking dish and sprinkle with 1/2 teaspoon of the caraway seeds.

Peel half of the apples, then cut both the peeled and unpeeled apples into 2-inch-thick wedges.

Pat the pork chops dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper.

Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until just smoking. Place the pork chops in the skillet in a pinwheel formation with the tips pointing toward the pan edge, and cook until golden brown on both sides, about 8 minutes, flipping halfway through. Transfer the pork chops to the baking dish, arranging them in a single layer on top of the sauerkraut.

Melt the butter in the skillet over medium heat. Add the remaining 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds, the sage, thyme and cinnamon, and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Stir the cider, sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper into the pot, scraping up any browned bits. Bring the liquid to a simmer and cook until reduced slightly, about 1 minute. Stir the apples into the skillet and cook until just heated through, about 1 minute. Pour the mixture into the baking dish, nestling the apples around the pork chops.

Cover the baking dish tightly with foil and bake until the pork chops are tender, 1 to 1 1/2 hours.

Remove the foil and continue to cook until the liquid is reduced by half, about 30 minutes longer. Let rest for 5 minutes before serving.

Serves 4.

Kim Davaz writes a biweekly cookbook review column for The Register-Guard.