Home › Meats and Poultry › Beef Loaf
Beef Loaf
a Put three pounds of round steak with a few bones into two quarts of cold water, season with one teaspoon of salt and cook till tender. Allow the meat to cool in the liquor. Remove the meat, rejecting the bones and skin, and put through a meat chopper, using the medium knife. Boil the liquor till it is reduced to two cups, then put in the meat, one-fourth teaspoon of paprika, juice and grated rind of one lemon, two tablespoons of vinegar, quarter of a teaspoon each of ground cloves, allspice and nutmeg. Pour the mixture into a buttered mold and set in the refrigerator to cool.
Turn out on a platter, cutting in neat slices. Serve with it beet salad.
This is a jellied pressed beef, not a baked meatloaf — the whole thing depends on the bones, so do not skip them.
- The hinge: gelatin from the bonesNothing binds this loaf but the collagen cooked out of the bones and connective tissue, concentrated by reducing the broth to two cups. Ask for beef shank, oxtail or a knuckle bone alongside the round; a boneless supermarket round will simply give you seasoned mince in cloudy stock. If in doubt, chill a spoonful of the reduced liquor first — it should set firm — and soften a teaspoon of powdered gelatin into it if it does not.
- Cooking time"Cook till tender" is the only instruction given; for three pounds of round with bones expect roughly 2 to 3 hours at a bare simmer, testing rather than timing. A hard boil will make the meat stringy and cloud the liquor, which matters here because the jelly is meant to look clear.
- Cooling in the liquorThis is not optional padding. Meat cooled in its own broth reabsorbs moisture instead of drying out, and the fat rises so you can lift it off the cold surface before reducing.
- The meat chopperA medium plate on a hand grinder gives a coarse mince, roughly the texture of a food processor pulsed six or eight times — not a paste. Pulled or hand-chopped meat works as well and slices more attractively.
- Season it coldChilled jelly tastes markedly blander than the warm mixture. Taste the meat and liquor when they are still warm, then push the salt, lemon and vinegar a little further than seems right; the paprika and the clove-allspice-nutmeg trio should be clearly present.
- Mold and setting timeThe quantity comes to something like six cups, enough to fill a standard 8x4-inch loaf pan; a single 1-quart mold will be too small, so use two smaller molds if that is what you have. Press the mixture down to eliminate air pockets, cover, and give it at least six hours in the refrigerator — overnight is better. Dip the mold briefly in hot water to unmold.
- SlicingUse a thin, sharp knife wiped between cuts, and slice the loaf straight from the refrigerator. Slices about 3/8 inch thick hold together; thinner ones crumble at the edges.
- Yield and keepingServes six to eight as a cold main course. Keep it covered and refrigerated, and eat within three days — the jelly is a moist, low-acid environment despite the lemon and vinegar.
Jellied and pressed meats were standard household economy long before commercial gelatin made them easy: a cheap cut with bones gave both the meat and the setting agent in a single pot, and the result kept better in a cool larder than the same beef would have done hot. This is a close relative of potted beef and of the German S tlze tradition, and the seasoning here tt lemon, vinegar, cloves, allspice, nutmeg tt recalls the sweet-sour spicing that turns up in sauerbraten and in the sour marinated meats of Central Europe, though whether this particular recipe descends from that tradition is a matter of inference rather than record. A reader would have understood it as a way of using the whole of an inexpensive round, served cold with a sharp accompaniment; the beet salad recommended at the end supplies the acidity and color that a slice of brown jellied beef needs.