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Beef Omelet
Mrs. S. B. Adams.
Four pounds of round beef, uncooked, chopped fine; six eggs beaten together; five or six soda crackers rolled fine, little butter and suet, pepper, salt, and sage, if you choose; make two loaves, roll in cracker; bake about an hour; slice when cold.
This is a meatloaf in all but name, built to be baked, cooled and sliced thin for a cold supper or sandwich. The original gives no oven temperature and no cooking guidance beyond "about an hour," so a few numbers help.
- Oven temperatureThe original gives none. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits a loaf of this kind; two loaves made from four pounds of meat should take roughly an hour to an hour and fifteen minutes at that heat, in line with the recipe's own "about an hour."
- Cook to temperature, not timeGround beef needs an internal temperature of 160F throughout. The hour in the original is a reasonable estimate for two modest loaves, but a thermometer in the center is the only reliable check, especially since the loaves are eaten cold and will not be reheated.
- "Round beef, chopped fine"Beef round chopped or ground fine; supermarket ground round works directly. It is lean, which is presumably why the recipe adds butter and suet.
- SuetRaw beef fat from around the kidney, sold by butchers and increasingly hard to find. Two to three ounces, chopped fine or grated while cold, is about right for four pounds of meat. Ground beef at 80/20 with a couple of tablespoons of butter accomplishes the same thing if suet is unavailable.
- Soda crackersPlain unsalted or lightly salted saltines are the closest modern equivalent. Five or six crackers rolled fine gives only a few tablespoons of crumbs, a very light binding for four pounds of meat, so the loaf will be dense and meaty rather than bready.
- "Roll in cracker"Most likely means coating the outside of the shaped loaves in more cracker crumbs before baking, giving the loaf a firm outer surface.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves quantities to the cook. For four pounds of meat, start with two teaspoons salt, a teaspoon of black pepper and a teaspoon of dried rubbed sage, and fry a spoonful of the mixture to taste before shaping.
- Cooling and yieldChill the loaves completely, several hours or overnight, before slicing; warm they will crumble. Two loaves of this size serve twelve to sixteen as a cold cut.
"Omelet" here means only that eggs bind the mixture, not that anything is folded in a pan; the name seems to have attached to several baked egg-bound meat mixtures, and beef omelet, veal loaf and ham loaf all belong to the same family of pressed, sliceable cold meats. The likely use was the sideboard: a loaf baked one day, chilled overnight and sliced thin fed a tea table, a picnic or a run of sandwiches without further cooking, which mattered in a household where the stove was lit deliberately rather than continuously. The Home Cook Book was assembled in Chicago in the 1870s from contributions by named local women, and recipes like this one, signed and unfussy, read as they were written down for a neighbor: quantities of the cook's own choosing, and the assumption that anyone reading already knew what a moderate oven felt like.