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Meat Loaf
Two pounds of chopped beef, one pound of chopped pork, two eggs, four teaspoons of milk, five crackers, roll fine, salt and pepper. Mix in loaf with bits of butter on top. Bake one hour. Mrs Henry N. Wilson.
A plain nineteenth-century meat loaf that assumes a cook who already knows what a loaf looks like. Two things are missing from the text: an oven temperature and any real binder liquid.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is given, which in a book of this period means the cook's own judgment. Bake at 350F; an hour at that temperature suits a loaf of roughly 3 lb formed about 4 inches wide.
- The milk is almost certainly under-statedFour teaspoons of milk for three pounds of meat and five crackers is barely enough to dampen the crumbs, and the original may have meant tablespoons. Add milk until the crumbs are soft and the mixture holds together without being wet.
- CrackersThese are likely soda or common crackers, rolled fine with a rolling pin. Depending on the size of cracker meant, five will give somewhere between 1/4 and 1 cup of crumbs; unsalted saltines are the closest supermarket equivalent, and panko will do at the same volume.
- Chopped, not ground"Chopped beef" and "chopped pork" here mean meat put through the household grinder or chopped by hand, coarser than modern fine grind. Ask for a coarse grind, or pulse chuck and pork shoulder briefly in a food processor for a better texture.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockA loaf containing fresh pork should reach 160F at the center. One hour is a fair estimate for a free-form loaf on a shallow pan; a loaf packed into a deep pan will need longer.
- Fat contentBeef at 80/20 with pork shoulder gives a moist loaf. Very lean ground beef with lean pork loin will produce something dry and crumbly no matter how carefully it is baked.
- Butter on topThe bits of butter are there to baste the surface as they melt, which matters more with a free-form loaf than one baked in a pan. Two tablespoons dotted over the top is enough.
- Seasoning and yield"Salt and pepper" is vague for three pounds of meat: figure about a teaspoon of table salt per pound, adjusted to taste. The loaf serves eight to ten, and slices better after resting ten minutes.
Meat loaf in this shape is a product of the mechanical meat grinder, which became a fixture in American kitchens in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and turned cheap cuts and leftover trimmings into something that could be seasoned, bound and served in slices. The beef-and-pork combination is a common one: beef for flavor, pork for fat and moisture. Cracker crumbs rather than fresh breadcrumbs point to the pantry of the period, when soda crackers came by the barrel and were used as a thickener and binder in everything from oyster stew to puddings. The attribution to Mrs Henry N. Wilson is typical of collections that printed contributions from readers under their married names, which is why the book reads less like a single authorial voice than like a community cookbook.