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Beef Loaf (Mix together pounds chopped)
Mix together 3 pounds chopped raw beef, 1/4 pound of minced salt pork, 1 cup cracker dust, 2 teaspoons, each, of salt and pepper, and moisten all with 2 beaten eggs, teaspoonful onion juice, and teaspoon Worcestershire sauce. Work in 2 tablespoons melted Crisco, and pack in a Criscoed mold. Cover; set in a roasting pan of boiling water, and cook in a steady oven for 2 hours. Serve with brown sauce.
A steamed meatloaf, baked in a covered mold in a water bath rather than a free-standing loaf pan, which keeps it pale, dense and sliceable. Two details need attention before you start: the pepper and the doneness.
- The pepperTwo teaspoons of salt to 3 1/4 lb of meat is about right; two teaspoons of black pepper is aggressive by modern taste and was probably meant as a rough parallel to the salt. Start with a scant teaspoon and adjust.
- "Steady oven"A moderate, unvarying heat. The book gives no temperature; a moderate oven of the period is conventionally read as somewhere around 350F. Because the mold sits in boiling water, the loaf itself never exceeds simmering temperature, so the oven setting matters less than keeping the water level up.
- Cracker dustFinely crushed plain soda or water crackers, closer to coarse flour than to crumbs. One cup of dry crumbs from unsalted crackers is the nearest equivalent; if you use salted crackers, cut the added salt.
- CriscoThis book was written to sell it. Any solid vegetable shortening works, as does an equal amount of butter for the mold, though butter browns where shortening does not.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate it on a microplane and use the liquid and slurry. A tablespoon of very finely grated onion is a fair substitute for a teaspoon of juice.
- Doneness, not timeTwo hours in a water bath will get a 3 lb loaf there, but check with a thermometer: 160F at the center for a beef and pork mixture. A covered mold in water gives no visual cues at all.
- The moldA 2-quart pudding mold or a loaf pan tightly covered with foil, set in a roasting pan with boiling water reaching halfway up. Let the loaf rest 15 minutes before turning it out or it will crack.
- Brown sauce and yieldServes 8 to 10. The brown sauce assumed here is a flour-thickened beef gravy; a jus made from the mold drippings whisked into a roux and beef stock does the job.
A Calendar of Dinners was one of Procter & Gamble's promotional cookbooks for Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening launched in 1911, and it shows: the fat is named, capitalized, and turned into a verb ("a Criscoed mold"). The dish itself belongs to an older tradition of steamed meat molds — meat pounded or chopped fine, bound with egg and cracker, and cooked gently in a bain-marie so it sets rather than roasts. Loaves of this kind slice cleanly cold, and the salt pork is there for the fat and cure flavor that lean chopped beef lacks.