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Veal Loaf
— Mrs. Chas. J. Bagley
Three pounds of chopped veal cutlets, one-half pound of salt pork chopped fine, two eggs, salt and pepper, little chopped onion. Mix thoroughly, form in a loaf, sprinkle with bread crumbs and bake in a hot oven one and one-half hours. Make plenty of gravy.
— Miss Emily Cole
A plain baked meatloaf of the sort that filled the meat course at church suppers. The proportions are sound; only the oven and the doneness test need translating.
- "Hot oven"Read this as 400-425F. At that heat a loaf of this size will brown well, but check it at the hour mark rather than trusting the full 90 minutes.
- DonenessGround veal should reach 160F at the centre on an instant-read thermometer. A 3.5 lb loaf usually gets there in 60-80 minutes at 400F, well short of the stated hour and a half.
- "Chopped veal cutlets"This means veal chopped or ground fine, not diced. Ask a butcher to grind shoulder or leg; supermarket ground veal works and is usually cheaper than cutlets.
- Salt porkSalt pork here is doing the work of fat and of seasoning. Rinse it and dice fine, or freeze it briefly and grind it with the veal. Add salt only after you have tasted a small fried-off patty of the mixture.
- BindingTwo eggs alone bind three and a half pounds of meat loosely. The crumbs are sprinkled on the outside as a crust, not mixed in, so expect a loaf that slices best after ten minutes of resting.
- "Make plenty of gravy"No gravy recipe is given; the drippings with a spoonful of flour and stock or milk would be the obvious approach. A free-form loaf on a sheet pan sheds fat and browned bits that make a better gravy than a loaf pan will.
- YieldRoughly 8 to 10 servings hot, and loaves of this kind were often eaten cold in slices or sandwiches the next day.
Veal loaf was a fixture of American community cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s, and a collection of this kind -- recipes gathered from named village women -- is exactly the sort of book that carried it, valued for dishes that could be made ahead and served cold to a crowd. Veal was cheap and abundant in dairying country, where bull calves were a by-product of keeping cows in milk, and its mild, gelatinous meat sets firm when cooled, which is why so many of these loaves were sliced cold rather than eaten hot. The salt pork is not seasoning alone but a necessity, veal being lean enough to bake dry without added fat. The double attribution here, with one name at the head and another at the foot, is a common artifact of such books.