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Veal Loaf
Take up the shoulder Strain the gravy and Garnish with a puree and serve with maitre Chop very fine four pounds of raw lean veal, a quarter of a pound each of ham and salt pork. Mix with the meat one cup of stale bread crumbs soaked in milk, a quarter of a cup of melted butter, one teaspoon each of salt, paprika and onion juice, one-quarter teaspoon each of allspice, cloves and nutmeg, the grated rind and juice of one lemon and two well-beaten eggs. Press into a buttered bread pan and cover the top with lardoons of salt pork; bake one hour. Cut when cold into thin slices.
A cold-sliced veal loaf of the sort meant for the sideboard, the tea table or a sandwich, not for serving hot in wedges. Note that the first two lines are a printer's overrun from the preceding recipe and have nothing to do with this one — the recipe proper begins at "Chop very fine."
- Ignore the first sentence"Take up the shoulder... serve with maitre" is stray type belonging to another recipe, not to this one. Start at the veal.
- Oven temperatureNo temperature is given because the book assumes a range you judged by hand. A loaf of this kind belongs in a moderate oven, 350F.
- Time versus temperatureOne hour will not bring a four-and-a-half-pound loaf of ground meat to a safe centre. Cook to 160F on an instant-read thermometer in the middle of the loaf, which in a standard bread pan is likely to take closer to an hour and a half. Ground meat carries surface bacteria all through it, so the centre reading is the one that counts.
- "Chop very fine"The 1900s kitchen used a hand chopper or a hand-cranked mincer. Ask the butcher to grind the veal, or pulse cubed shoulder in a food processor in small batches — a full purée gives a pasty, sliceable-but-dull loaf.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve; one teaspoon takes about half a small onion. Grated onion pulp itself works and adds a little moisture.
- Lardoons of salt porkHere it means thin strips laid over the top, not larding needles pushed through the meat. Bacon or thinly sliced pancetta does the same job of basting the surface. Rinse salt pork before use, and taste for salt before adding the full teaspoon — between ham, salt pork and added salt this loaf can easily run over.
- PaprikaPaprika in American kitchens of this period would generally have been the sweet Hungarian kind, used as much for colour as heat. Do not substitute smoked or hot paprika.
- Cooling and slicingThe instruction to cut when cold is structural, not fussy. Cool the loaf in its pan, then weight it lightly and chill several hours or overnight; only then will it cut into clean thin slices rather than crumbling.
- YieldFour and a half pounds of meat, more once the soaked crumbs, butter and eggs are added, giving a large bread-pan loaf that serves ten to twelve as a cold meat, or many more sliced for sandwiches. It keeps three or four days refrigerated.
Veal loaf was a fixture of American cookery from the 1880s through the 1920s, when it turned up at luncheons, picnics and church suppers as the respectable cold alternative to sliced roast. Veal was cheap and abundant in a dairy economy that produced surplus bull calves, and its mildness and gelatine made it ideal for a loaf: it sets firm as it cools and slices cleanly, which beef will not do as readily. The seasoning here — allspice, cloves, nutmeg, lemon rind — is the older English and colonial forcemeat palate, closer to a potted meat or a galantine than to the tomato-and-onion meatloaf that displaced it after the First World War. The salt pork and ham are there for fat and savour, since lean veal on its own bakes dry. It is the sort of dish made once, kept in the cold room, and drawn on for several days of cold plates and sandwiches.