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Beef Loaf
Two pounds of round steak One-half cup of cracker crumbs Two eggs Two tablespoons of butter One-half cup of milk Two teaspoons of Larkin Table Salt One-quarter teaspoon of Larkin Pepper Mix well and bake an hour.
A bare-bones meatloaf from an era when the cook was assumed to know the rest. Two things are missing from the text: the meat has to be ground, and no oven temperature is given.
- Grind the round steak"Two pounds of round steak" means two pounds of round put through the grinder, twice for a fine even texture. Two pounds of pre-ground beef, ideally 85/15, does the same job; very lean ground round will bake dry, so a few ounces of ground pork or a little extra butter helps.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature at all. 350F is a safe modern choice: an hour at 350F suits a loaf of this size in a standard loaf pan; free-formed on a shallow pan it will brown more and cook slightly faster.
- Doneness, not clock timeGround meat should reach 160F in the centre. An hour usually gets there, but oven and pan shape vary, so check with a thermometer rather than trusting the hour.
- Cracker crumbsHalf a cup means crushed plain soda crackers, roughly 1.5 to 2 ounces. Crackers are salty in themselves, so taste before committing to the full two teaspoons of salt.
- Soak the crumbs firstStir the crumbs into the milk and let them stand a few minutes before adding the eggs and meat. A hydrated panade is what keeps the loaf tender; dry crumbs mixed straight in absorb moisture unevenly.
- ButterTwo tablespoons should be softened or melted and worked in, not left in cold lumps. It stands in for the fat missing from lean round.
- Mixing"Mix well" is best read as mix thoroughly but briefly. Overworking ground beef makes the loaf springy and dense.
- Larkin salt and pepperHouse-brand products of the Larkin Company; ordinary table salt and black pepper are exact substitutes. Two teaspoons of salt for two pounds of meat is on the high side of modern taste but not out of range.
- YieldServes six to eight hot, and slices cleanly cold the next day, which was much of the point of a beef loaf.
Baked meat loaves are often said to have become standard American household cooking as mechanical meat grinders grew common in home kitchens in the later nineteenth century: they turned cheap, tough cuts like round into something that could be sliced and served twice, hot at dinner and cold at supper. The branded salt and pepper here mark this as a promotional cookbook. The Larkin Company of Buffalo began as a soap manufacturer and grew into a vast mail-order house selling groceries, spices and household goods through its "Larkin Clubs", distributing recipe booklets that used its own products by name. Recipes in such books are characteristically terse, listing ingredients and little else, on the assumption that any woman running a kitchen already knew that round steak went through the grinder before it went into the pan.