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Meat Loaf or Meat Balls
1 Pound Ground Beef 1 Cupful Cold Cereal 1 Egg 1 Teaspoon Salt 1 Teaspoon Seasoning 1/8 Teaspoon White Pepper Use enough bread or cracker crumbs to make the proper consistency for rolling into balls or forming a loaf. It is well to let the cereal stand covered in the oven or a warm place till heated through, then work into it the meat and other ingredients, using the hand. Cook the balls in a little hot cooking oil, or drippings in a frying pan. The loaf should be baked in the oven; use the same fats, and if desired baste with a tomato sauce.
A wartime-thrift meat loaf that stretches a pound of beef with leftover breakfast porridge. Two of its measurements need translating before you start.
- "Cold cereal" means cooked porridge"Cold cereal" here most likely means cooked cereal — oatmeal, cream of wheat, grits — left over and gone cold, rather than flakes from a box; the direction to let it stand covered in a warm place until heated through before working in the meat supports that reading, since warming it helps it blend in instead of sitting in lumps.
- "1 teaspoon seasoning"Genuinely ambiguous. Period cookbooks used the word for a proprietary blend or for the cook's own mix of sage, thyme, marjoram and onion. Treat it as a teaspoon of poultry-seasoning-style dried herbs, or your own blend, and adjust to taste.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. Bake the loaf at 350F until the centre reaches 160F on a thermometer, roughly 50 to 60 minutes for a pound formed into a compact loaf.
- White pepperWhite pepper is often chosen so that no dark specks show in a pale loaf. Black pepper will serve if that is what you have, though the flavour is not identical.
- Crumbs are a corrective, not a fixed amountThe recipe leaves the quantity open because the moisture of the cereal varies. Add bread or cracker crumbs a spoonful at a time only until the mix holds a shape without cracking; too many and the result turns dry and bready.
- Mixing by handThe instruction to use the hand is worth following, but work quickly and lightly. Overworking ground beef compacts the protein and gives a springy, sausage-like texture rather than a tender one.
- Balls in the panBrown them in the fat over medium heat, then cover and let them finish through; they need to reach 160F inside, not merely to look browned outside.
- Tomato bastingThe recipe offers basting as optional. If you do baste, adding the sauce towards the end of baking reduces the risk of the top darkening or catching before the middle is done.
- YieldAbout four servings as written, stretching to five or six alongside potatoes and a vegetable.
Meat loaf of this kind belongs to the era of the household meat grinder and the campaign against kitchen waste. The extender here is not the packaged breadcrumb of later recipes but cooked cereal, apparently saved from an earlier meal; the recipe does not bother to say which cereal. The vagueness elsewhere is characteristic too: "1 Teaspoon Seasoning" and "enough crumbs to make the proper consistency" assume a reader who has already watched the procedure done, or who has a seasoning blend to hand. Books of this sort taught proportion and procedure and left judgement to the cook, which is why a modern reader has to supply the oven temperature the original never gives.