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Meat Loaf
1½ lb. hamburg, 1 cup cracker crumbs, 1 cup milk, 1 egg, 1 tsp. poultry dressing, 1 tsp. salt, 2 tbsp. catsup. Line pan with bacon, put loaf in and then cover with 3 slices of bacon. Bake in slow oven 1½ hours.
— Mrs. Hiram B. Gibbs
A plain church-supper meat loaf that holds up well. Two terms need translating and the oven wants a number.
- "Hamburg"Period shorthand for ground beef, not a seasoned patty mix. Use 80/20 chuck; leaner grinds go dry over a long bake, especially with a full cup of milk already in the panade.
- "Poultry dressing"This means poultry seasoning — the dried sage, thyme, marjoram and savory blend sold for stuffing, not prepared stuffing itself. A teaspoon is modest for 1 1/2 lb of meat; sage-forward blends will read strongly, so taste a pinch of the raw mix cooked off in a skillet if you want to adjust.
- Slow ovenRoughly 300-325F. At that temperature a loaf this size needs the full 1 1/2 hours and probably a little more; cook to 160F at the center rather than by the clock.
- Cracker crumbsSoda crackers (saltines) are the likeliest intention -- about 25 to 30 crackers crushed fine fills a cup. They are saltier than dry breadcrumbs, so the teaspoon of salt is already accounted for.
- Soak the crumbs firstThe recipe lists milk and crumbs separately but the point of both is a panade. Let the crumbs stand in the milk five minutes until slushy before mixing in the meat, then handle it lightly — overworking ground beef makes a springy, dense loaf.
- The bacon liningLine the pan across the bottom and up the long sides with strips, lay the loaf in, and cover the top with three more. Bacon in a loaf pan renders into the meat rather than crisping; if you want it browned, uncover the top strips under the broiler for two or three minutes at the end.
- Rendered fatA bacon-lined loaf pan gives up a lot of grease. Rest the loaf 10 minutes, then lift it out with two spatulas or tip the pan off before slicing, or the slices sit in fat.
- YieldSix servings, or four with cold leftovers, which is arguably the point of a meat loaf.
Meat loaf as Americans know it belongs to the era of the household meat grinder and cheap commercial crackers -- both widely available by the 1880s -- which turned scraps and tough cuts into something that could be stretched with milk, crumbs and an egg. Recipes like this one, contributed under a subscriber's name, are exactly the sort of dish community fundraising cookbooks were built from: inexpensive, forgiving, made in quantity, and safe to serve to a crowd whose tastes you did not know. The tell of the period is "poultry dressing" used as a seasoning in beef, a thrifty reach for the sage tin already in the cupboard, and the catsup, which by 1900 was a bottled pantry staple rather than something a cook made herself.