Savory Beef
Three and a half pounds of round beefsteak, chopped fine; three eggs, twenty oyster crackers, rolled fine; four tablespoons sweet cream; butter size of an egg; salt and pepper to taste; little nutmeg. Thin with milk to consistency of biscuit dough; put in a buttered pan; bake one and one-half hours. Eat when cold. Sliced for tea or lunch. -Mrs. W. P. Lynde.
A cold meat loaf of the kind Victorian and Edwardian households kept on hand for sliced suppers. The original gives no oven temperature and no doneness cue, so both need supplying.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, so the cook was expected to judge it. Bake at 350F; a loaf this size will take roughly the stated hour and a half.
- Doneness, not timeGround beef needs an internal temperature of 160F at the centre. A 3 1/2 lb loaf baked loose in a shallow pan cooks faster than one packed into a deep tin, so check with a thermometer rather than trusting the clock.
- Butter size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century books often measured butter by comparison to eggs, walnuts and hazelnuts, probably because it was cut from a crock or roll rather than a marked wrapper.
- Oyster crackersTwenty small crackers rolled fine gives only a small quantity of crumbs, on the order of a few tablespoons up to about a quarter cup. Crushed plain crackers or dry breadcrumbs stand in, though breadcrumbs will give a slightly different texture.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh cream rather than soured or cultured cream, distinguished because both were normal in a kitchen without refrigeration. Heavy cream is correct.
- "Round beefsteak, chopped fine"Round chopped by hand or coarsely ground, coarser than modern supermarket mince. Ask for a coarse grind, or pulse trimmed top round yourself; standard 80/20 chuck will give a greasier, softer loaf than intended.
- Consistency of biscuit doughThe hinge of the recipe. Add milk only until the mass just holds together and drops heavily from the spoon; a wet mixture will not slice cleanly when cold, which is the whole point of the dish.
- Cooling and slicingCool in the pan, then chill several hours or overnight before cutting. Weighting the loaf with a small plate as it cools makes for firmer, thinner slices.
- YieldAbout twelve to fourteen generous slices, enough for a tea table of six to eight with bread and pickles.
Cold sliced meat loaves were a fixture of the American tea table and the cold lunch through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the evening meal in many households was a light one built from things already cooked. Veal loaf, ham loaf and beef loaves like this one were baked in the morning, chilled in a cellar or icebox, and sliced through the week; the crackers and cream are there as much to bind the loaf for slicing as to stretch the meat. The nutmeg is worth noting as a survival of an older seasoning habit, when sweet spice in savory forcemeats and potted meats was ordinary rather than exotic. The attribution to Mrs. W. P. Lynde is typical of community and subscription cookbooks of the period, which were assembled from contributions by name and assumed a reader who could judge oven heat without being told.