Hamburg Roast
Remove the fat and stringy parts, also marrow-bone, from two pounds round steak. Pass through the meat grinder twice; add the marrow taken from bone, one tablespoon green pepper finely chopped, one tablespoon onion finely chopped, season well with salt and the beaten yolks of two eggs or one whole egg slightly beaten; add onehalf cup of soft bread crumbs that have been soaked in cold water thirty minutes and wrung dry in a double cheese cloth. Mix ingredients thoroughly with the hand. Shape in a compact roll of uniform thickness. Lay thin slices of salt pork or bacon in the bottom of a dripping pan, set the roast on them; lay thin slices of salt pork over the meat and place in a hot oven. After the first eight S minutes reduce the heat and baste with the hot fat in the pan; let cook about thirty minutes, basting every ten minutes. The roast should be richly browned on the outside and a delicate pink inside. Serve surrounded with Tomato, Brown or Creole Sauce.
A 1913 meatloaf in the older sense: no loaf pan, just a hand-shaped roll barded with salt pork and roasted fast. Most of the work is in the mixture, and the only real decisions are oven heat and when to stop.
- Oven temperaturesPeriod cookbooks generally put a "hot oven" somewhere around 400-450F for the initial browning; the recipe gives no figures. "Reduce the heat" is unspecified, but moderate heat, roughly 350F, suits the remainder of the roasting.
- DonenessThe recipe wants the centre "a delicate pink," which is below what is now advised for any ground meat: bacteria on the surface of the original cut are distributed throughout the grind. Cook to 160F on an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part, which will read faintly rosy at most.
- TimingRead literally (eight minutes hot, then "about thirty"), the recipe allows well under an hour, which is optimistic for a two-pound roll unless it is shaped fairly slim. Expect longer, and judge by the thermometer rather than the clock.
- The meatRound steak ground twice gives a lean, close-textured roast. Ask the butcher to grind a two-pound piece of round twice, or grind it at home; pre-packaged lean ground beef works but is coarser and looser.
- Marrow and salt porkThe marrow scraped from the bone and the pork laid above and below are the entire fat budget of a very lean mixture. Unsmoked salt pork or thin-cut bacon both work; if using bacon, the roast will taste smoked.
- Soaked bread crumbsSoft crumbs from a day-old loaf, soaked in cold water and wrung out in doubled cheesecloth, act as a panade and keep the lean beef tender. A clean kitchen towel or a fine sieve pressed with the back of a spoon does the same job.
- BastingBaste with the fat that renders from the pork, every ten minutes. With very lean beef there is little self-basting, so this is what keeps the outside from drying to a crust.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of meat will serve roughly five or six. The tomato, brown or Creole sauces named here are presumably given elsewhere in the book; any good tomato sauce or pan gravy loosened with stock suits it.
Chopped-beef "Hamburg steak" is generally traced to American cookbooks of the later nineteenth century, where it is often said to have appeared as a supposedly digestible dish for invalids and dyspeptics, promoted on the grounds that the grinder had done the chewing already. By the 1910s it had shed the sickroom associations and become thrifty family food, and cooks began treating the seasoned mixture as a roast rather than as patties: shaped into a roll, barded with salt pork, browned hard and sliced at table like a joint. That is exactly the ambition of this 52 Sunday Dinners version, which uses round steak, marrow from its own bone and a water-soaked panade to make two pounds of cheap lean beef carry a Sunday menu. The instruction to serve it "surrounded" with sauce reflects the period's plating conventions, where the sauce went into the dish rather than over the meat.