The Vintage Fall Campbell's Pork Chop Recipe You Won't Find On Dinner Tables Today
Cooking up a fall recipe usually means dishing up something cozy, and is there anything more satisfying than a plate of hot pork chops smothered in gravy? Campbell's Soup used to tout a recipe for their Autumn Pork Chops on the back labels of their Cream of Celery and Cream of Chicken Soup varieties. But somewhere along the line, this fall dish disappeared from Campbell's lineup. Autumn Pork Chops was once part of the company's recipe repertoire, appearing in Campbell's cookbooks and recipe materials, but it's no longer among the recipes featured on Campbell's current website.
If you're in the mood to try Autumn Pork Chops, they are simple enough to make. First brown your chops in a pan drizzled with olive oil, then add the creamy soup, some apple juice, spicy brown mustard, honey, and a bit of pepper. Simmer the sauce-covered chops until it's thickened and the chops are cooked through, then serve them on top of cooked egg noodles. You can always substitute water for apple juice if you don't want the final product to be that sweet.
Changing taste has made cooking with soup something of a popular anomaly
Once upon a time, simple recipes like Campbell's Autumn Pork Chops — which combined canned soup with a protein, a frozen or canned vegetable, and egg noodles or rice — were a staple of American home cooking. Whole generations grew up on retro dishes like tuna noodle casserole and other quick-to-make meals built around convenience. But once the 1980s passed, home cooks turned toward liking and crafting meals with fresher flavors and serving less packaged and ultraprocessed food to their families out of concern for their health. The company has also begun to move with the times, adding a high-protein soup line, selling unsalted soups, and partnering with Banza to sell gluten-free cans of some of their iconic recipes.
Today, there are countless recipes for homemade gravy and gravy additions at home cooks' fingertips, making it easy to skip the can of soup in favor of a from-scratch sauce. That doesn't mean canned soup has disappeared from American kitchens, though. In fact, Campbell's still has plenty of recipes that use condensed soup to make quick, comforting meals. So while Autumn Pork Chops may no longer be part of Campbell's current recipe lineup, its basic formula is still alive and well — proving that some old-fashioned shortcuts never really go out of style.