Beef Omelet
Three pounds of beefsteak, one light pound of suet chopped fine, salt, pepper, and a little sage, three eggs, seven crackers rolled fine; make into a roll and bake.
This is a meatloaf under an older name: "omelet" here means only that eggs bind the mixture. The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no pan, so those are the gaps to fill.
- Grind the beefsteakThree pounds of steak was meant to be chopped fine by hand or run through a meat grinder. Use 3 lb of coarsely ground chuck, or have a butcher grind steak trimmings; pre-packaged lean ground beef will give a drier loaf.
- "One light pound" of suet"Light" means a scant pound rather than a heaped one, and even so it is a great deal of fat by modern taste. Beef suet is sold by butchers and some supermarkets around the holidays; half the quantity, or an equal weight of fatty ground pork, produces a loaf closer to what a modern palate expects.
- Seven crackersThese are plain soda or water crackers. Period crackers were often larger than a modern saltine, so seven crushed fine may come to something like 3/4 to 1 cup of crumbs; measure by volume rather than by count.
- OvenThe original gives no temperature; 350F suits a loaf of this size, and much hotter risks setting the outside before the centre is done.
- Time and donenessA free-formed roll of this weight takes about 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the middle: 160F for ground beef, which is the only reliable test here.
- Shaping"Make into a roll" means a free-standing loaf on a shallow pan, not a loaf tin. The suet renders out, so set the roll on a rack over a rimmed sheet or it will sit in its own fat.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper are unmeasured; for 4 lb of meat and fat, start with about 4 teaspoons salt and 1 teaspoon pepper. "A little sage" means dried rubbed sage, roughly a teaspoon.
- YieldAround 4 lb of raw mixture, serving ten to twelve hot. Loaves of this kind were also eaten cold in slices, though this recipe says nothing about how it was served.
Nineteenth-century American cookbooks used "omelet" loosely for anything egg-bound, and beef omelet appears in a number of them as a way of turning tough or leftover steak into something sliceable. It belongs to the same family as veal loaf: chopped meat, cracker crumbs, egg, a little sage, baked in a roll and served cold with the Sunday supper or packed into a lunch pail. The heavy hand with suet reflects a kitchen where rendered fat was a valued thing rather than something to be drained away, and the crackers reflect the habit of keeping a barrel of hard soda biscuit on hand for exactly this sort of stretching.