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Veal Loaf with Creole Sauce
3 lbs. veal. 3/4 lb. fat pork. 1 onion.
Put the veal, pork and onion together through the meat grinder. With these mix two cups of fine bread crumbs and season highly. Beat two eggs and add to the mixture. Roll in the shape of a loaf and bake in oven one hour, or until done. Baste as you would chicken. It is a good idea to squeeze the juice of a lemon over the loaf before putting in the oven. This improves the flavor and gives more liquor with which to baste. Serve with Creole sauce.
A plain forcemeat loaf of the kind that filled the meat course between roasts. Mrs. Wilson gives no oven temperature and no seasoning quantities, which is where most of the work lies.
- Oven temperatureNone is stated. A loaf of this size wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the full hour; hotter and the lean veal tightens and weeps before the centre is set.
- "Fat pork"This means fresh unsmoked fatback or salt pork, not bacon. Fatback is still sold at butchers; if you use salt pork, rinse and soak it, and cut back sharply on the added salt. Ground pork shoulder is the easiest modern stand-in, though it carries less fat.
- "Season highly"For 3 3/4 lb of meat, figure roughly 1 tablespoon salt plus plenty of black pepper; veal loaves of the period commonly used some combination of nutmeg, mace, thyme, sage or celery salt. Fry a teaspoon of the mixture and taste before shaping.
- Doneness"Until done" meant a clear-running skewer. Ground veal and pork should reach 160F on an instant-read thermometer at the centre; an hour at 350F will get a free-form loaf there, but check rather than trust the clock.
- BastingA free-standing loaf on a shallow pan gives up very little fat. The lemon juice helps, but add half a cup of stock or water to the pan and baste from that every fifteen minutes, or the crust will harden before the inside cooks.
- Bread crumbs"Fine bread crumbs" may mean soft crumbs from stale bread rather than the dry sandy commercial kind; period books use the term both ways and the recipe does not say. Two cups of dry crumbs will drink far more moisture; if that is what you have, moisten them with a little milk first.
- ShapingThe mixture is meant to be rolled by hand into a loaf and baked open to the oven so it browns; the instruction to baste implies it is not covered. A loaf tin will steam it instead and produce a paler, wetter result.
- Yield and the sauceServes eight to ten, and it is at least as good cold and sliced thin the next day. The Creole sauce it calls for is presumably the standard tomato, onion and green pepper sauce; the recipe assumes the reader knows it.
Veal loaf was a fixture of American cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s, its popularity often linked to the spread of the home meat grinder, which made it easy to stretch a cheap cut with crumbs and eggs into something that carved like a roast. Veal is generally said to have been plentiful and cheap in eastern cities at the time, and its mildness and lack of fat explain both the added pork and the insistence on seasoning highly. Mrs. Wilson wrote for Philadelphia readers during and just after the First World War, when she was closely associated with government food-conservation campaigns, and loaves of this sort - extendable, servable hot or cold, good in a lunch box - were exactly the sort of economical cooking she promoted. The Creole sauce is the era's all-purpose brightener for a pale dish: tomato, onion and sweet pepper, a New Orleans idiom that had long since become general American restaurant vocabulary.