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Beef Loaf
2 lbs. round steak, ground 1/2 lb. lean pork, ground ½ t salt Pinch pepper 2 soda crackers, rolled 2 eggs, well beaten and mixed with little water Make into loaf, put into bread pan, and bake one hour or until real brown.
A plain church-supper meatloaf that relies on the cook knowing what "real brown" looks like. A few blanks need filling.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A loaf of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the stated hour; at that heat a 2 1/2 lb loaf in a standard bread pan reaches doneness in about 60 to 70 minutes.
- Doneness by thermometerBecause the mix includes ground pork, take it to 160F at the centre rather than judging by colour alone. "Real brown" describes the crust, not the interior.
- The salt figureThe salt quantity as printed does not correspond to any workable amount. For 2 1/2 lb of meat, roughly 2 teaspoons of salt is the usual proportion; season to your own practice.
- Soda crackersTwo crackers is a very light binder by modern standards. Modern saltines are the nearest equivalent, though period soda crackers were often larger biscuits, so the crumb yield is uncertain -- perhaps a couple of tablespoons. Expect a loose, meat-forward loaf rather than a firm sliceable one; three to four tablespoons of crumbs holds it together better.
- Round steak, groundButchers once ground round to order, giving a lean coarse grind. Ground round or 85/15 ground beef is the closest supermarket equivalent; the half pound of lean pork supplies the fat and softness.
- The bread panRead as a loaf pan, roughly 9x5 inches in modern terms, though period bread pans varied. Fat cannot drain in a loaf pan, so the loaf sits in its own drippings; if you want a browner exterior all round, free-form the loaf on a shallow rimmed pan instead.
- Resting and yieldLet it stand 10 minutes before slicing or it crumbles. Serves six to eight hot, and it slices cold for sandwiches.
Community cookbooks from Midwestern churches in the early twentieth century are thick with loaves of this general kind: beef stretched with a little pork, bound with whatever cracker or bread was on hand, baked in the pan already sitting in the kitchen. The appeal was arithmetic as much as taste, since a loaf fed a crowd, cost less than roasting joints, and sliced cold the next day without complaint. Meatloaf in this form is generally traced to the spread of commercial meat grinders into home and butcher-shop use in the late 1800s, which put uniformly ground beef within reach of ordinary households; soda crackers, sold by the barrel and then in sealed packets, became the standard binder in American recipes of the period.