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Cannelon of Pork
1/2 lb. lean pork. 1 egg. 1 C rolled oats Seasoning Grind pork. Mix with eggs, oats and seasoning in a bowl. Pour ½ C tomatoes over it. Bake slowly.
Mrs. H. E. Gaddis.
This is a church-supper meatloaf written for someone who already knew the proportions — the pork and eggs are named in the method but never quantified. Treat the printed text as a reminder rather than a formula.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the oats (1 cup) and tomatoes (1½ cups) are given numbers. A loaf on this scale would take something in the region of 2 lb ground pork and 2 eggs, but the original does not say so, and there is no way to recover the contributor's exact intent.
- "Grind pork"In home kitchens of the period this would have meant putting fresh pork through a hand grinder. Modern ground pork from the butcher is the direct equivalent; shoulder gives a better loaf than very lean cuts, which dry out.
- Rolled oats as binderOats here do the work of breadcrumbs, absorbing juices and tomato liquid. Old-fashioned rolled oats behave as intended; quick oats disappear into mush and steel-cut will stay hard.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven is usually taken as somewhere between 275 and 325°F. At the upper end of that range a loaf of about two pounds would want roughly 1¼ to 1½ hours.
- DonenessThis is the point that matters. Ground pork must reach 160°F on an instant-read thermometer in the centre of the loaf — ground meat cannot be judged by colour, and the tomato acid keeps a pink cast even when fully cooked.
- Tomatoes"1½ C tomatoes" most likely means canned tomatoes with their liquid, broken up. Canned diced tomatoes, juice included, are the closest match; tomato sauce makes the mixture too wet for the oats to set.
- SeasoningLeft entirely to the cook, as was normal. Salt at about a teaspoon per pound of meat, plus pepper, sage or a little onion — pork carries sage well and the loaf is bland without it.
- Yield and servingMade with about 2 lb of pork, the loaf serves six to eight. As a luncheon dish it was sliced and served warm; cold slices also went into sandwiches.
"Cannelon" comes from the French cannelon, a rolled or cylindrical shape, and in late nineteenth-century American cookbooks it named a seasoned forcemeat of beef, veal or pork formed into a roll and baked or braised — essentially the meatloaf under a more genteel name. By the time this congregation collected its recipes the word had drifted from a hand-shaped roll to anything of that mixture baked in a pan. The oats are the telling detail: cereal extenders stretched meat, and rolled oats are often said to have been promoted by American millers in this period as a cheap, wholesome addition to loaves and croquettes. The compression of the instructions — no quantities for the pork or eggs, no oven detail, no time — is typical of church cookbooks, which were generally written by cooks for cooks presumed to have made the dish before.