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Meat Roll
Season one pound chopped beef with salt and pepper and roll about one-half inch thick. Wrap it around bread crumb dressing, shape it like a jelly roll, and bake in a moderate oven about an hour. Make the dressing of bread crumbs, seasoned with onion if you like, and salt and pepper.
— Mrs. Chas. E. Nichols
A plain rolled meatloaf, written for cooks who already knew what a bread dressing was. The recipe gives no binder, no fat and no pan, so a few decisions are left to you.
- "Moderate oven" is 350F"Moderate oven" is roughly 350-375F -- An hour in that range is right for a roll made from a single pound of beef. If your roll is fatter than about three inches through, check the centre rather than trusting the clock.
- Chopped beef means ground beefIn a book of this date "chopped" is what came off the butcher's block or out of the household meat grinder. Use ordinary ground chuck at roughly 80/20; very lean beef will bake dry with no egg or fat in the mix.
- It needs a binder to rollSeasoned beef alone will crack when you spread it half an inch thick and roll it. An egg and a couple of tablespoons of milk or crumbs worked into the meat holds it together.
- Spread on paper or a damp clothPat the meat into a rectangle of about 7 by 8 inches, the half-inch thickness the recipe calls for, on parchment or waxed paper, spread the dressing to within an inch of the edges, then lift the paper to roll it like the jelly roll the recipe names. Pinch the long seam and both ends shut so the dressing stays inside.
- Moisten the dressingDry crumbs with onion, salt and pepper will bake to sand. Soften the crumbs with a little stock, milk or melted butter until they clump when squeezed, as you would for poultry stuffing.
- Cook to temperatureGround beef should reach 160F at the centre of the meat, not the dressing. An hour at 350F usually gets there; a thermometer settles it.
- Pan and bastingBake seam-side down in a shallow pan so the sides brown. A little water or stock in the pan and two or three bastings keep the outside from hardening, and give you the beginnings of a gravy.
- YieldOne pound of beef plus dressing serves three, or four at a table with potatoes and a vegetable. Let the roll rest ten minutes before slicing or the spiral will fall apart.
Church and grange cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of dishes like this one: a small quantity of ground meat stretched with bread, shaped to look like a roast. The comparison to a jelly roll suggests the writer expected her readers to be practised at sponge cakes. Stuffed rolled meat has older and grander relatives across Europe, from Italian braciole to German Rouladen, and it resembles the beef olive of English cookery, a thin slice of beef wrapped around forcemeat. What changed in the American village kitchen was the spread of the hand-cranked meat grinder in the second half of the 1800s, which let a cook build the roll out of cheap chopped meat instead of a carefully cut slice. The attribution to Mrs. Chas. E. Nichols, husband's initials and all, is the ordinary form of credit in a community collection, where recipes were signed the way a visiting card was.