Meat Roll
Take 1 pound each of lean beef, veal and pork.
Remove all gristle, put through the food chopper and mix well, adding I 1/2 cupfuls of fine crumbs made from stale bread sliced, toasted in the oven until lightly colored, then pounded or passed through the food chopper and sifted; 3 wellbeaten eggs, 1 cupful of water, 1 tablespoonful of salt, ½ teaspoonful of white pepper or paprika, I onion grated, 1/4 of a teaspoonful each of grated nutmeg and curry powder. Work thoroughly with the hands and shape in a loaf. Arrange in a shallow pan, cover the top with thin slices of larding pork and bake for one hour and a quarter in a hot oven, basting every fifteen minutes.
Serve either hot or cold-it is especially good sliced cold for luncheon or supper.
A three-meat loaf of the kind that fed a household twice — hot at dinner, sliced cold the next day. The proportions are sound; only the oven language and the pork covering need translating.
- Oven temperatureA "hot oven" here means 400-425F. At that heat a loaf of this size browns well, but check it at the hour mark: it is done when the center reads 160F.
- The meatEqual parts beef, veal and pork give a loaf that slices cleanly when cold. Ground meat from the counter works; ask for a coarse grind, or a single pass through the plate if you grind your own. Skip the food chopper and buy ground meat if you like, but keep the three-way mix — all beef sets up dense and crumbly.
- Larding porkThin sheets of fresh pork fatback, sold as fatback or barding fat at good butchers. Blanched salt pork or plain unsmoked streaky bacon does the same job: it self-bastes and keeps the top from drying. Remove it for the last 15 minutes if you want color on the loaf itself.
- The crumbs matterThe bread is toasted dry, ground and sifted, so these are dry crumbs, not soft fresh ones. That is why a full cup of water goes in — soft crumbs will make the mixture slack. If using commercial dry breadcrumbs, 1 1/2 cups is right.
- SaltA tablespoon for three pounds of meat is roughly 1.3 percent by weight of the meat, and lower again once the crumbs, eggs and water are counted. On the assertive side but reasonable for a loaf meant to be eaten cold, when seasoning reads flatter. If your ground pork is already seasoned, cut it to two teaspoons.
- BastingEvery fifteen minutes is frequent by modern habit, and it helps the crust. Spoon the pan fat back over the top; if the pan runs dry, add a little water rather than more fat.
- Yield and servingThree pounds of meat plus binder feeds eight to ten. Let it rest 15 minutes before slicing hot. For the cold luncheon version, chill it overnight in the pan under a weight — it firms up and cuts into much neater slices.
The seasoning is suggestive here: nutmeg, curry powder and white pepper together are often taken to point toward the German-American and English cold-table tradition rather than the ketchup-glazed American meatloaf that took over later in the century. Ground meat loaves of this type are commonly associated with the spread of the hand-cranked food chopper, which had become a standard kitchen fixture by the late nineteenth century, and it may be why so many books of this era assume one on the counter and specify "put through the food chopper" as casually as they say "chop fine." A loaf like this was economical arithmetic as much as cookery: cheap lean cuts, a cup and a half of stale bread, and three eggs stretched to two full meals, with the cold slices doing the work of a more expensive luncheon meat. The curry powder is a small period signature: it had been cheap, shelf-stable and widely used in American kitchens as a general savory lift rather than to make anything taste of curry.