Veal Loaf
Chop fine three pounds of leg or loin of veal and three-fourths pound salt pork, chopped finely together; roll one dozen crackers, put half of them in the veal with two eggs, season with pepper and a little salt if needed; mix all together and make into a solid form; then take the crackers that are left and spread smoothly over the outside; bake one hour, and eat cold. - Gov. Tilden, N. Y.
A plain forcemeat loaf from the era before ground beef meatloaf took over. The original assumes a cook who knows her own oven and her own butcher, so the two things it never says are the temperature and the doneness.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A loaf of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F. Anything hotter sets the crumb coating before the centre cooks.
- Time and donenessOne hour is optimistic for close to four pounds of meat packed into a solid form. Cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre, which will usually take an hour and a half or more. Ground veal and pork must be cooked through, not left pink.
- The meatThree pounds of leg or loin chopped fine is ground veal; ask the butcher to grind it once, coarsely, rather than buying pre-ground. The three-quarter pound of salt pork is the fat and much of the salt, which is why the recipe adds salt only "if needed."
- Salt porkCommercial salt pork today is likely to be more uniformly cured, and often saltier, than the home-cured barrel pork a household of the 1870s would have had. Taste a small fried piece of the mixture before adding any further salt. Unsmoked fatback or a fatty fresh pork shoulder with reduced salt works if salt pork is unavailable.
- CrackersA dozen crackers means plain soda or water crackers, not saltines in the modern thin sense and certainly not sweet crackers. Rolled fine, a dozen gives somewhere around a cup to a cup and a half of crumbs, depending on the cracker; half goes in the loaf, half coats the outside.
- MoistureVeal, crackers and two eggs make a dense, dry mixture by current standards. Adding half a cup of milk or stock keeps it sliceable rather than crumbly.
- Shaping and pan"Make into a solid form" most likely means a free-standing loaf on a shallow baking pan, which would let the crumb coating brown on all sides; a loaf tin tends to steam the sides instead.
- Serving and yieldEaten cold, as directed, it firms overnight in the refrigerator and slices thin for sandwiches or a cold supper plate. Roughly eight to ten servings.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, issued in Minneapolis in 1877 and reprinted many times, filled out its pages with recipes solicited from or attributed to public figures, and this loaf carries the name of Samuel J. Tilden, governor of New York in 1875-76 and the losing candidate in the disputed presidential election of 1876. Whether the governor's kitchen actually produced it is anyone's guess; the attribution was a selling point, and cookbooks of the period traded in such names freely. The dish itself is older than the celebrity: a chopped veal loaf bound with egg and cracker, baked and eaten cold, recalls English forcemeat and potted-meat traditions and served much the same purpose as a terrine, giving a household sliceable cold meat that kept for several days in a cool larder. Veal was a natural choice because it is lean and mild and takes seasoning without asserting itself, with salt pork supplying the fat it lacks. The all-beef meatloaf that later dominated American kitchens is a subsequent development, associated with cheap mechanically ground beef.