Beef Loaf
2 pounds round of beef put through food chopper 3/4 cup soft bread crumbs 1 tablespoon Argo or Kingsford's Cornstarch 1/2 cup scalded milk 1 egg 1¼ teaspoons salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 3 slices onion put through food chopper 1/2 teaspoon poultry seasoning Mazola Combine the crumbs, cornstarch, milk and seasonings and stir until the mixture boils. Add to the meat and onion with the egg well beaten and form into a loaf. Place in a baking pan, pour a little Mazola over the top, dust with flour and bake until browned about fifteen minutes in a hot oven, 375 degrees F. Then add a little hot water to the pan and one or two tablespoons Mazola and baste the meat occasionally with this. Bake an hour. Pared white or sweet potatoes or pared and sliced parsnips may be baked in the pan with the meat.
A straightforward meatloaf from a corn-products promotional booklet, distinguished by a cooked cornstarch-and-milk panade that keeps lean round beef from drying out. A few notes before you start.
- The hinge: cook the binder firstThe crumbs, cornstarch, milk and seasonings are brought to a boil before they meet the meat. That gelatinized starch paste holds moisture through a long bake and is the whole reason a loaf of lean round does not turn to sawdust. Skipping the boil leaves you with raw starch and a crumbly loaf.
- "Hot oven, 375 degrees"This booklet calls 375F a hot oven. Take the number, not the adjective, and use 375F throughout.
- Salt quantityThe "11/4 teaspoons" is 1 1/4 teaspoons, a printing artifact. That is right for 2 lb of meat.
- The brand namesArgo and Kingsford's are cornstarch; any cornstarch works. Mazola is corn oil, used here both as the fat brushed over the loaf and as the basting fat in the pan. Neutral vegetable oil substitutes exactly.
- Round of beefGround round runs about 85-90% lean. Ask a butcher to grind a chuck-and-round mix if you want more fat; with straight round the basting step is not optional.
- DonenessThe stated hour and a quarter total is about right for a 2 lb loaf, but ground beef should reach 160F at the center. Check with a thermometer rather than the clock.
- The pan vegetablesPotatoes or parsnips added to the pan need the basting liquid to keep from scorching. Add them when you add the hot water and oil, after the initial browning, and cut them to roughly equal size.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a 2 lb loaf will serve roughly six. Let it rest at least fifteen minutes before cutting or it will fall apart.
This comes from a cookbook published by the Corn Products Refining Company, the makers of Argo and Kingsford's cornstarch and Mazola oil, and the recipe is built to demonstrate both. Booklets of this kind were a standard advertising vehicle in the early twentieth century: a manufacturer paid a home economist to write a few dozen reliable recipes in which its product was indispensable, then gave the book away or sold it for a few cents. Mazola, introduced in the 1910s, was pitched as a modern replacement for lard and butter in baking and frying, and recipes like this one worked hard to show corn oil doing a job cooks associated with animal fat. The cooked-starch panade is the more interesting survival: it is the same principle behind the bread-and-milk soaker in a German Hackbraten and, more recently, the water-roux methods used in bread baking.