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Gravy (Dash of cayenne Put the meat)
Dash of cayenne Put the meat through a meat grinder, add the other ingredients, moisten with left-over gravy, and season more highly if necessary. Grease a shallow pan with bacon fat, put in loaf, and press into shape, adding a little more thin gravy. Bake half an hour, or until brown on top.
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This is a fragment: the page opens mid-ingredient-list, so the quantities of meat, crumbs and egg are lost. What survives is a complete method for a leftover-meat loaf, and the method is the useful part.
- What is missingThe text begins at the tail of an ingredient list, with only the cayenne intact, so we do not know what the other ingredients were or in what quantity. Loaves of this kind are commonly built from about a pound of ground cooked meat with a binder such as soft breadcrumbs and an egg, plus onion, salt and pepper, but that is a guess at the shape of the missing list, not the author's figures.
- Oven temperatureNo heat is specified, which was usual when ranges had no thermometers. A moderate oven, around 350F, will brown a loaf of this kind, and half an hour is plausible since the meat is already cooked and only needs heating through and a crust.
- The hinge: moistureEverything hangs on the gravy. Meat that has already been cooked has given up its juices, so a dry mixture bakes into a brick. The loaf should be distinctly soft when you press it into the pan, and the extra thin gravy poured around it keeps the bottom from drying out.
- Meat grinderA food processor works but chops rather than extrudes, and will turn cooked meat to paste in seconds. Pulse in short bursts to a coarse mince, or use the grinder attachment on a stand mixer with the coarse plate.
- Bacon fatSaved fat was a common kitchen standby. Any solid fat will grease the pan, but bacon fat is doing some seasoning work here as well as lubrication.
- Shallow panNot a loaf tin. The mixture is hand-shaped into a free-standing loaf in a shallow baking dish so that the top and sides brown; a deep tin will steam it.
- Seasoning"Season more highly if necessary" is the instruction to take seriously. Cold cooked meat tastes flatter than fresh, and the loaf will taste blander still once it cools, so season the raw mixture past the point that seems right.
- YieldUnknowable, since the quantities are missing; a loaf built from about a pound of meat would serve roughly four.
Cookbooks devoted entirely to leftovers were a small industry in the early twentieth century. Grinding, moistening with the saved gravy and rebaking as a loaf was the standard answer, and the cayenne here is doing exactly what the period expected of it, sharpening meat that has already given its best. The instruction to moisten with left-over gravy assumes something this book takes for granted and modern kitchens do not: that yesterday's gravy was saved as a matter of course, in a covered bowl, and treated as an ingredient in its own right.