Filipino Beef
1 pound round beef 1/2 pound lean fresh pork 1 small onion 1 green pepper 1 teaspoon salt 1 cup stale bread crumbs 1 egg 2 cups stewed tomatoes 2 slices bacon 1 tablespoon butter 1½ tablespoons flour Remove the seeds from the pepper and run it through the meat grinder with the meat and onion. Add crumbs, beaten egg and seasoning; make into a roll; place in a shallow baking dish; pour the strained tomatoes around it; put the bacon on top and bake forty minutes, basting with the tomatoes. Thicken the gravy with the flour cooked in the butter, and serve.
A meat roll of the pre-mixer era: everything goes through the hand grinder together, which does the mixing for you. The recipe assumes a cook who knows what oven to use and when meat is done, so both need stating.
- Oven temperatureNone is given; a shallow baking dish with a basting liquid points to a moderate oven, 350F. Anything hotter will reduce the tomatoes to a scorched paste before the centre of the roll is cooked.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockForty minutes is optimistic for a loaf of about 1 1/2 pounds. Ground beef and pork mixed together should reach 160F at the centre; expect 50 to 60 minutes, and check with a thermometer rather than trusting the time.
- GrindingIf you have no grinder, buy 1 lb coarse ground beef and 1/2 lb ground pork and pulse the onion and pepper fine in a food processor before mixing. Do not process the meat itself into paste; the loaf turns rubbery.
- Round beefTop or bottom round, very lean. With only 1/2 lb of pork added the loaf is still fairly lean, which may be why the bacon goes on top. The recipe asks for lean fresh pork, though a shoulder cut rather than loin will keep the roll from drying out.
- Stale bread crumbsSoft crumbs torn from day-old bread, not the dry sandy crumbs sold in canisters. A cup of dry crumbs would absorb far too much moisture; if that is all you have, use about half as much and moisten with a few spoonfuls of milk.
- Stewed tomatoes, strainedCanned whole or diced tomatoes pushed through a sieve; a large (28 oz) can is needed to end up with the two cups wanted. Straining matters here because the liquid is both the basting medium and the gravy base.
- The gravyCook the flour in the butter for a minute or two before adding the pan liquid, or the sauce tastes raw. Whisk the roux into the strained pan tomatoes off the heat, then return to a simmer to thicken.
- Resting and yieldLet the roll stand ten minutes before slicing or it will crumble. Serves four generously, five at a stretch.
American cookbooks of the two decades after 1898 sometimes attached the word "Filipino" to dishes that had little to do with the islands, the Philippines having become suddenly and uneasily present in the national imagination after the Spanish-American War; "Spanish" and "Creole" were used the same loose way, generally signalling nothing more than tomatoes, green pepper and onion. That said, a seasoned roll of ground pork and beef bound with egg and crumbs and cooked in a tomato sauce is not far from the Filipino embutido, itself often traced to Spanish colonial charcuterie, so the name may be more than decoration here, though the connection is traditional rather than documented. What the recipe reliably shows is the American household meat loaf arriving in its modern form: the hand-cranked grinder had made minced meat a domestic rather than a butcher's product, and stale bread, one egg and a can of tomatoes could stretch a pound and a half of meat across a family table.