Sophie Tucker
HAMBURGER ROAST
1 pound chopped meat 2 eggs Stale bread soaked 1 pinch sugar 1 pinch salt 1 pinch pepper Mix and knead together; spread layer on greased roasting pan.
Four hard-boiled eggs, sliced and spread on layer of meat, spread another layer of meat over eggs; place in oven until well done.
And you have some good eating!
Cundially Arhie Tucker
CHOPPED
1 quart cucumbers 3 large onions 2 red peppers 1/3 cup salt Horse radish (to suit taste) 1 pint vinegar 1 large cup sugar 1 dessert spoon mustard seed 1 dessert spoon allspice, whole Pare the cucumbers and cut in small pieces. Chop the onions, take seeds from peppers and let stand over night. Next day squeeze dry and put in boiling vinegar in which sugar, mustard and allspice have been mixed. Cook for three quarters of an hour. When ready to put in jars put a few strips of horse-radish with it.
Two recipes run together here: a two-layer meatloaf baked flat in a roasting pan, and a chopped cucumber pickle. Both give quantities but almost no oven detail, so a few numbers help.
- "Chopped meat"In American usage of this period this means butcher-ground beef. A moderately fatty grind (around 80/20) gives the moisture the recipe assumes; very lean beef will bake dry in a shallow layer.
- "Stale bread soaked"The quantity is genuinely unstated. The intent is a panade: two or three thick slices of dry white bread soaked in milk or water, squeezed out, and worked into the meat. Roughly a cup of squeezed crumb per pound is the usual proportion.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A loaf of this kind belongs at 350F. Spread in a roasting pan rather than a loaf tin it cooks quickly — figure 35 to 45 minutes for a layer about an inch and a half thick.
- "Until well done"Ground beef should reach 160F throughout. Because the hard-boiled eggs sit in the middle, take the temperature of the meat itself, not the centre of the loaf, or you will read the cool egg and keep baking.
- Assembling the layersPress the bottom layer firmly and leave a margin of an inch around the sliced eggs, then seal the top layer down at the edges. Otherwise the loaf splits along the egg seam as the fat renders.
- YieldA pound of meat with bread and eggs feeds four modestly. If you double it, spread it in a larger pan rather than a thicker layer; a thicker layer will need appreciably longer.
- Pickle: the overnight salt standThe instruction reads oddly because the salt is listed but never explicitly applied. The cucumbers, onions and peppers are salted with the third of a cup, then left overnight to draw out water; the next morning they are squeezed dry. Skipping this gives a watery, slack pickle.
- Pickle: dessert spoonA dessert spoon is about two teaspoons — between a teaspoon and a tablespoon. So roughly two teaspoons each of mustard seed and whole allspice.
- Pickle: storageThree quarters of an hour of boiling leaves the cucumbers soft rather than crisp, which is what a chopped pickle of this era was meant to be. The recipe says nothing about sterilising or processing the jars; treat it as a refrigerator pickle, keep it cold, and use it within a month rather than storing it on a shelf.
Celebrity cookbooks sold for charity were a staple of the 1930s and 1940s, and performers were expected to contribute something that read as personal -- hence the facsimile signature (apparently "Cordially, Sophie Tucker," garbled in transcription) at the foot of the page. The dish is a familiar form of Jewish-American home cooking: a meatloaf built in layers around sliced hard-boiled egg, a construction also found in the egg-centred meat rolls of Eastern European and Russian cooking. Tucker was born in what is now Ukraine to a family that ran a kosher restaurant in Hartford, Connecticut, where she waited tables and sang for tips before going into vaudeville, so a substantial ground-beef loaf stretched with soaked bread sits comfortably with her background. The cucumber pickle appended below it belongs to a different tradition -- the American sweet-and-sour chopped pickle, kin to chow-chow and piccalilli -- and carries no attribution, so it may simply have been set on the same page.