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Creole Meat Loaf
Add to 1 pound chopped round steak, 1/2 cup tomato pulp, 1/2 cup bread crumbs, yolk 1 egg, 1 tsp. salt, 1/4 tsp. pepper. Bake in covered pan or individual moulds 1/2 hour, moderate oven. Uncover and bake 20 minutes.
Serve with tomato sauce if desired. MRS. H. P. FROST.
A lean, plainly seasoned loaf that depends on the covered first stage to keep it from drying out. Two notes matter most: round steak is very lean, and the loaf needs a thermometer rather than a clock.
- Moderate ovenSet 350F. The original two-stage bake — 30 minutes covered, then 20 uncovered — works at that temperature for a loaf of this size.
- Chopped round steakThis means beef round run through a grinder: lean, roughly 85-90% lean by modern labelling. Ground chuck (80/85%) gives a moister loaf if you do not mind the change; with true round, the covered stage is doing real work.
- Tomato pulpFresh tomato flesh, seeds and skin removed, crushed. Half a cup of drained canned crushed tomatoes or passata is a fair substitute; do not use tomato paste, which is far more concentrated.
- Bread crumbsProbably soft crumbs from day-old bread rather than dry packaged crumbs, though the recipe does not specify. If you only have dry crumbs, about a third of a cup, moistened with a splash of milk or the tomato juice you drained off, is a reasonable equivalent.
- Egg yolk onlyThe yolk binds the loaf, and without the white the mixture is less likely to set up firm. One pound of meat with a single yolk makes a fairly loose mixture — pack it firmly into the pan so it holds together when sliced.
- DonenessGround beef should reach 160F at the centre. On a 1 lb loaf the stated 50 minutes will usually get there, but individual moulds cook considerably faster; check them at 30 minutes total.
- YieldOne pound of meat makes a small loaf serving three, or four individual moulds. Double the quantities for a family meal.
- The tomato sauceServe it as a sauce alongside rather than baking it over the loaf; the uncovered second stage is there to dry and brown the surface, and a topping undoes that.
The Philathea Cook Book, like most church and club collections of its era, gathered recipes signed by the women of the congregation, and "Creole" in such books rarely meant Louisiana cooking in any strict sense — it functioned as a general label for anything built on tomato, and sometimes onion and green pepper. Meat loaf's rise as a fixture of American home cooking is often traced to the spread of mechanical meat grinders, since a loaf let a cook stretch a pound of tougher, cheaper beef with bread crumbs and serve it hot or cold in slices. The instruction to bake in "individual moulds" reflects the period's fondness for small shaped portions.