Meat Cakes
1 lb. round steak 3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 3 small onions 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 2 eggs 1/4 lb. grated cheese 2 cupfuls breadcrumbs Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste Tomato sauce
For Sauce (Tablespoonfuls Crisco carrot)
4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 carrot 1 turnip 2 onions 3 tablespoonfuls flour 2 cupfuls stock 1 can or 1/2 lb. fresh tomatoes 1 tablespoonful tomato catsup 1 bunch sweet herbs Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 1 blade mace 1 bay leaf For meat cakes. Grind steak and onions together, add Crisco, cheese, parsley, crumbs, seasonings, and eggs lightly beaten. Mix together; form into small cakes, toss in flour and fry in hot Crisco. Serve hot with tomato sauce. For sauce. Slice vegetables, fry in Crisco ten minutes; then add flour, stock, mace, bay leaf, tomatoes, catsup, and herbs. Stir till they boil, then simmer gently forty-five minutes. Rub through sieve, add seasonings and use. Sufficient for twelve meat cakes.
This entry gives quantities only — the method has to be inferred, and the proportions are the useful information here. Treat it as a formula for a bound, cheese-rich beef patty rather than a hamburger.
- The missing methodNo method is printed. A mixture of these ingredients would have been ground, worked with the beaten eggs, crumbs, grated cheese, finely chopped onion and parsley, shaped into flat cakes and fried in the melted shortening, with the tomato sauce served over them. The grinding, the number of passes and the point at which the sauce goes on are all inference, not in the original.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, which is why hydrogenated shortening appears where an older cookbook would say butter, beef drippings or lard. Any of those, or a neutral oil, does the same job in a skillet.
- Round steakGround round from the butcher counter is the direct substitute, about 15 percent fat. Grinding it yourself from a whole piece of round gives a coarser, more steak-like texture.
- The crumb ratioTwo cups of breadcrumbs to one pound of meat is a lot of filler by modern taste — these are closer to a rissole than a burger. Dry crumbs will also drink up moisture; if you use soft fresh crumbs the mixture stays looser and you may want to cut them to a cup and a half.
- OnionsThree small onions is roughly one cup chopped. Softening them in a little of the fat before mixing removes the raw bite and keeps them from staying crunchy in a cake that fries for only a few minutes.
- CheeseA quarter pound grated is about one cup. Period American recipes meant a firm store cheese — a sharp Cheddar is the sensible reading. It browns and can catch, so keep the pan at a steady medium heat rather than high.
- CookingFlatten the cakes to about three quarters of an inch and fry six to eight minutes a side, turning once. Ground meat should reach 160F throughout; the cheese and crumbs make the interior look set before it actually is.
- YieldA pound of meat with this much crumb and cheese makes six to eight cakes, enough for four with a starch and a vegetable.
A Calendar of Dinners belongs to a genre of cookbook published by manufacturers to teach cooks to use a new product — in this case Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced in 1911, which the recipes in the book are designed to showcase. Meat cakes of this kind were standard household economy: a single pound of round, stretched with bread and cheese into a dish for a family. Recipes titled "meat cakes," "rissoles" or "cannelon" all drew on the same economy, though a cannelon was a rolled or moulded loaf and rissoles were commonly enclosed or breaded, and the tomato sauce finish reflects how quickly canned tomatoes and bottled sauces became a fixture of American cooking once commercial canning was widespread. The book's daily-menu structure — a dinner prescribed for every date of the year — was itself a selling device, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper planning without a cook.