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Some Kitchen Kinks: Chop
Chop the meat. Chop the onion and cook (but do not brown) it in the fat tried out of a small portion of the pork. Add the bread and cook a few minutes. When this is cool, mix all the ingredients and form into a long round roll. The surface can easily be made smooth if the hand is wet with cold water.
Lay the remaining pork cut in thin slices on top and bake forty minutes in a hot oven. The sausage may be omitted if desired and other seasoning used.
This is the method half of a baked meat roll — an early meatloaf — printed without its ingredient list, which the book gave elsewhere. Read it as a technique rather than a formula.
- The missing quantitiesNo amounts survive on this page, and the recipe names only meat, onion, pork, bread and sausage. One possible reconstruction, offered as a guess rather than a reading of the text: about 2 lb chopped meat, a small onion, 1 to 1 1/2 cups soft breadcrumbs, a few ounces of fresh sausage meat, and 4 to 6 oz salt pork, part rendered and part sliced for the top, with salt and pepper. A beaten egg to bind is a modern addition, not something the original calls for.
- "Tried out"To try out fat is to render it: dice a little of the salt pork and cook it slowly until the fat runs and the scraps are golden. Cook the onion in that fat, keeping it pale, then discard or chop in the scraps as you like.
- "The bread"Soft crumbs from a stale loaf, not dried packaged crumbs, which absorb far more liquid. Cooking them briefly in the onion fat is the point of the step — it flavours them and keeps the roll from tasting bready.
- A hot ovenRoughly 400 to 450F in the language of the period. For a roll of this size the lower end of that range is the safer choice; much hotter and the pork on top can burn before the centre is done.
- Forty minutes is not the testTiming depends entirely on how thick you make the roll. Cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre, which for a roll about 3 inches thick usually falls between 40 and 55 minutes.
- The pork on topThe thin slices are barding — they baste the roll as they render and crisp. Lay them overlapping across the whole surface, and set the roll on a rack or in a shallow pan so it does not stew in the drippings.
- Wet handsThe advice holds. Cold water on the palms stops the mixture sticking and lets you compact the roll evenly; a loosely packed roll cracks along the top as it bakes.
- YieldIf made to the suggested quantities above it would serve about six; the original gives no yield. It is also good cold and sliced thin the next day.
Baked meat rolls of this kind sit between older forced-meat traditions and the loaf-pan meatloaf that became common in American kitchens in the early twentieth century. The hand-formed "long round roll", barded with sliced salt pork and baked free-standing, is the earlier style: it needs no special tin, and the pork does the work that a pan of drippings would later do. Compendia of this sort often framed such dishes in terms of thrift as well as cookery — chopped meat stretched with bread and onion and seasoned with a little sausage. The closing permission to omit the sausage and use "other seasoning" suggests a cook working from what was already in the pantry.