Beef Loaf
1½ pounds round steak Small piece of suet 1 cup bread crumbs Salt and pepper 1 small onion Butter Have a small piece of suet ground with the beef; mix thoroughly with the crumbs, the seasoning and the onion finely chopped. Moisten the crumbs slightly with milk or water. Mold into a loaf; put into a roasting pan with a little water; make indentations in the top of the loaf with the finger and fill with small pieces of butter. Serve hot with brown sauce, or cold, sliced thin.
A plain meatloaf from before packaged ground beef, with no egg, no oven temperature and no time — all things worth pinning down before you start.
- Have the butcher grind itThe recipe assumes you hand over a 1½-lb piece of round steak plus a knob of beef suet and get it ground together. Ordinary 85/15 ground beef is the closest equivalent; if you use lean ground round, ask for 2–3 oz of suet or beef fat ground in, or the loaf will be dry and crumbly.
- How much suet"Small piece" is genuinely vague. Aim for roughly 2–3 oz for 1½ lb of meat, which lands the loaf near 15 percent fat. Much more and it renders out into the pan water.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A meatloaf of this size bakes well at 350F. Cook to an internal temperature of 160F at the centre, about 50–60 minutes for a loaf 4 inches wide.
- No eggThere is no binder here beyond the milk-soaked crumbs, so the loaf slices best after it has rested 10 minutes and cooled slightly. If you want firm cold slices the next day, one beaten egg worked into the mixture is in keeping with other meat loaves of the period.
- The crumbsDry, stale bread crumbs, not the sandy commercial kind. Moisten only until they clump — a wet mixture steams rather than browns.
- The water in the panHalf an inch is plenty. It keeps the drippings from scorching and gives you a base for the brown sauce; too much and the bottom of the loaf poaches.
- The butter dimplesThis is the step that does the work. The pressed hollows hold small pieces of butter that melt down over the top and give a browned, basted crust in place of the bacon or glaze a modern recipe would use. Do not skip them, and do not cover the pan.
- Brown sauceIn a book of this date that means a simple roux-based gravy: butter and flour cooked to a nut brown, loosened with the pan drippings and stock, seasoned. It is not a demi-glace.
- YieldServes four to five hot, or makes about a dozen thin cold slices for sandwiches — which is plainly the second half of the recipe's purpose.
Beef loaf belongs to the era when a household bought meat as a cut and had it ground to order, and when the ability to serve one dish hot on Sunday and sliced cold on Monday was a mark of good management rather than a leftovers strategy. The direction to have suet ground in with round steak is the tell: round is lean, and before standardised ground beef a cook could specify her own fat ratio at the butcher's block. Loaf-shaped meat dishes are generally traced in American cookbooks to the late nineteenth century; earlier chopped-meat cookery leaned toward forcemeats, rissoles and puddings. Mrs. Fryer's loose-leaf format suits exactly this kind of recipe, a workhorse that a cook would reach for often enough to wear the page out.