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Sliced Molded Meat
Chop any cold meat very fine, add a third of the quantity of minced ham, have about two cups in all. Soak a cupful of bread crumbs in as much milk as it will absorb and mix with the meat.
Season with poultry dressing. Beat an egg in half a cup of cream, add this to the mixture. Soak a tablespoonful of gelatin in one quarter cup of cold water, dissolve in a cup of boiling water, add to other ingredients. Mix well and pack tightly in a mold. Chill on the ice. When ready to serve turn out, cut in slices with a very sharp knife and garnish with slices of lemon, decorated with dots of paprika and chopped parsley.
IO
This is a cold-set loaf: nothing in it is cooked after assembly, and one of its ingredients is a raw egg. The notes below explain the terms and then why the dish fails on modern food-safety grounds.
- The raw egg is the problemAn egg beaten into half a cup of cream is stirred into the meat. A cup of boiling water does go in with the dissolved gelatin, but it is not enough to bring the whole mass to a pasteurising temperature, so any Salmonella in the egg is unlikely to be killed, and the loaf is then only chilled. A modern recipe for a cold meat mold should be used instead.
- A cold, moist, low-acid holding mediumChopped cooked meat, milk-soaked crumbs and cream with no acid and no cooking step after assembly; the minced ham is cured, but at a third of the meat it is nowhere near enough to preserve the loaf, which is also handled repeatedly during packing and unmolding. That is a favourable setting for bacterial growth, and refrigeration slows it rather than stopping it.
- "Chill on the ice"This means the icebox, cooled by a block of ice delivered to the house. Iceboxes generally ran warmer and less steadily than a modern refrigerator, which is held at 40F or below.
- Poultry dressingNot stuffing but the seasoning blend sold for it, what a supermarket now labels poultry seasoning: mostly sage and thyme, often with marjoram, savory and black pepper.
- "Any cold meat"The recipe is a leftovers formula. The solid content is about two cups in all, the ham being a third as much as the chopped meat.
- The gelatin quantityA tablespoon of granulated gelatin is roughly one modern envelope, about a quarter ounce, bloomed in cold water and dissolved in boiling. Here it is doing structural work only; it contributes nothing to the safety of the loaf.
- YieldTwo cups of meat plus crumbs, cream and something over a cup and three-quarters of added liquid makes a small loaf, perhaps enough for four to six luncheon slices.
Sliced molded meats belong to the long tradition of the cold table, where a bound loaf of chopped meat and gelatin could be made ahead, sliced thin and served without further work: an ancestor of the pressed veal loaves and jellied tongues of Victorian cookery, and a cousin of the aspic salads that dominated American luncheon menus well into the mid-twentieth century. Commercial granulated gelatin, generally traced to the 1890s, is what made such things a weeknight proposition rather than a project built on a calf's foot. The logic of the dish is plain enough: the meat was already cooked on some earlier day, and the loaf itself asks only for the icebox. The garnish of lemon slices dotted with paprika and parsley is characteristic of the period's cold-buffet styling, where colour was applied to the plate rather than built into the food.