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Beef Loaf (Three pounds of raw beef)
Three pounds of raw beef chopped fine, two graham crackers rolled fine, one egg, half cup of milk, one tablespoon of salt, onehalf teaspoon of pepper; mix well together. Make into a loaf, bake one and one-half to two hours.
— Miss Kate Casey
A plain village meat loaf with almost no binder and no oven setting given. The gaps are easy to fill, but the salt and the baking time both deserve a second look.
- Oven temperatureThe receipt assumes a cook who knew her own range. Bake at 350F, uncovered, in a shallow pan or a loaf tin.
- When it is doneNinety minutes to two hours is likely to be longer than a three-pound loaf needs at 350F. Cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre, which for a free-form loaf of this size generally falls somewhere between 1 and 1 1/2 hours.
- The saltA full tablespoon of table salt in three pounds of meat is about 1.3 percent by weight, at the upper edge of modern seasoning. Two teaspoons is closer to current taste, and if you are using coarse kosher salt the tablespoon is roughly right by volume.
- Graham crackersPeriod graham crackers were plainer and much less sweet than the modern square, and not necessarily the same size. Two of today's crackers will not bind three pounds of meat; use about half a cup of crumbs, or an equal volume of dry breadcrumbs.
- MoistureHalf a cup of milk and one egg is lean for this quantity. Soak the crumbs in the milk before mixing, and expect a firm, sliceable, distinctly old-fashioned loaf rather than a soft one.
- "Chopped fine"This means hand-chopped or run through a meat grinder, coarser than supermarket ground beef. A coarse grind, or chuck pulsed briefly in a food processor, gives the intended texture; 80/20 keeps it from drying.
- YieldThree pounds of meat serves eight to ten. It slices better cold, the next day, which is very likely how the original household ate most of it.
Chopped-meat loaves entered American cookery in the later nineteenth century as a way of using the cheaper cuts, helped along by the hand-cranked meat grinder that was becoming common in home kitchens, and they spread through community cookbooks like this one, where each receipt carries a contributor's name and the authority of a neighbour's table. The graham cracker here is a marker of period: the graham flour it was made from took its name from Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached coarse unsifted wheat, and the cracker had by this date drifted well away from his austere intentions to become an ordinary pantry item, used here as a binder. Note what the receipt does not contain — no onion, no herbs, no ketchup glaze — which sets it apart from the tomato-topped meat loaf most American cooks now picture.