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Beef Loaf
Two lbs. hamburg steak, 1 cup sweet milk, 4 crackers rolled, 1 egg, a little poultry dressing, salt and pepper to suit taste.
— Mrs. B. T. Northridge
A bare-bones church-supper meatloaf that assumes the cook already knows what to do with a loaf pan. Everything unstated — pan, oven, time — has to be supplied.
- Hamburg steakSimply ground beef, sold at the time freshly ground to order. Chuck at around 80/20 gives the closest result; anything leaner than 90/10 will bake dry with only one egg and a cup of milk binding it.
- Sweet milkWhole milk that has not soured — the distinction mattered when recipes routinely called for sour milk paired with saleratus. Whole milk from a carton is the direct equivalent.
- Crackers rolledPlain soda crackers crushed with a rolling pin, not sweet biscuits. Period crackers ran larger than modern saltines, so four may give anywhere from a couple of tablespoons to something nearer half a cup of crumbs; either way it is a light amount of binder. Let the crumbs sit in the milk five minutes before mixing so they swell and hold the loaf together.
- Poultry dressingHere it means poultry seasoning, the dried sage-and-thyme blend sold for stuffing, rather than actual bread dressing. A teaspoon is "a little"; sage dominates the mixture and more than that will take over the loaf.
- No oven givenBake at 350F. A two-pound loaf shaped in a standard 9x5 pan needs about an hour, or 65 to 75 minutes, and should reach 160F at the centre.
- ShapingA free-form loaf on a shallow baking sheet will brown on all sides and drain better than one packed into a pan, where it sits in its own fat. The recipe specifies neither, and both shapes turn up in cookbooks of the period.
- Seasoning"Salt and pepper to suit taste" in a raw mixture means guessing. Reckon on about 1 1/2 teaspoons salt for two pounds of meat, or fry a teaspoon of the mixture in a skillet and taste before committing the whole loaf.
- YieldSix servings hot, and it slices better cold the next day — one reason the loaf form was so popular for suppers and lunch pails.
Meatloaf in this form belongs to the era when the household meat grinder became common equipment and "hamburg steak" — chopped beef, generally traced to the German immigrant kitchens of the later nineteenth century — turned up on menus everywhere in America. Stretching that meat with soaked crackers or bread and binding it with egg and milk made two pounds feed a table of six, the sort of dish that suited a community cookbook: these were compiled by church groups to raise funds, and the recipes they collected are overwhelmingly things that scale, travel and hold. The dish is credited to Mrs. B. T. Northridge, and the brevity of the instructions assumes a reader who needed no telling how to bake a loaf.