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Spanish Loaf
1½ C bread crumbs 3 T butter 1 lb. pork, ground 1 lb. beef, ground 1 green pepper, chopped 3T celery, chopped 1 small onion, chopped Salt Moisten bread crumbs with a little water. Mix all together well and bake one hour.
Mrs. C. L. Thomson.
A plain church-supper meatloaf with no oven temperature, no pan size and no egg. All three are recoverable from context.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives none. A loaf of this size is usually baked in a moderate oven, around 350F; one hour suits a roughly 2-lb loaf packed into a standard loaf pan, and a free-form loaf on a sheet pan will likely cook a little faster.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockGround pork and beef should reach 160F at the centre. On an hour timer alone a cold, densely packed loaf can come out short of that, so check with a thermometer before slicing.
- Bread crumbsThese are most likely dry crumbs from stale bread rather than fine commercial crumbs. Moisten with water, as directed, until they are damp and crumbly rather than pasty, and let them sit a minute before mixing.
- No egg, no binderThe recipe relies on the crumbs and the fat in the pork to hold the loaf. Mix thoroughly, as instructed, and press firmly into the pan; a loosely filled loaf will crack and fall apart on the slice.
- Salt, unmeasuredTwo pounds of meat wants roughly 1½ to 2 teaspoons of fine salt. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture in a skillet and taste it before committing the whole loaf.
- The butterThree tablespoons adds richness. Melt it and work it through the crumbs; with modern 80/20 ground beef and untrimmed pork you can cut it to two without much loss.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat plus crumbs serves six to eight at lunch, and the cold loaf slices well the next day for sandwiches.
"Spanish" in American cookbooks of this period is rarely a claim of origin; it is shorthand for green pepper, and sometimes onion and tomato with it — the same convention that gives us Spanish rice, Spanish omelet and Spanish sauce. A single chopped green pepper was enough to move a household meatloaf out of the plain column. The dish itself belongs to the ground-meat loaf tradition that is generally said to have spread once home meat grinders became common kitchen equipment, letting cooks stretch cheaper cuts with bread crumbs.