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January 9
Menu: Vermicelli Soup; Beef Loaf, Tomato Sauce; Mashed Potatoes; Baked Squash; Apple and Celery Salad; Cheese Wafers; Mince Pie; Coffee Beef Loaf-2 pounds lean meat, 3 tablespoons Crisco, 14 pound salt pork, 1 cup cracker crumbs, 3 beaten. eggs, 1 teaspoon onion juice, 1 tablespoon lemon juice, 1 cup beef stock, salt and pepper to taste. Wipe meat, remove all skin and membranes, then put it through meat grinder, add Crisco melted, eggs, crumbs, onion juice, lemon juice, stock and seasonings. Press into greased pan and cover. Bake 1 hour. Baste occasionally during baking with melted Crisco.
A plain meatloaf from Crisco's day-by-day dinner calendar, written for cooks who knew their own stoves and needed no temperature. A few gaps are worth filling before you start.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A covered loaf of this size bakes well at 350F; an hour may be enough, but a covered loaf with a cup of stock in it can run longer. Ground beef needs 160F internally, so check with a thermometer rather than the clock.
- The salt porkIt appears in the ingredient list and then never again in the method. Grind it with the beef — it is there for fat and seasoning, and the loaf will be dry without it. Salt lightly afterwards, since the pork brings its own.
- An ambiguous quantityThe salt pork is printed as "14 pound," almost certainly a mangled 1/4 pound. A quarter-pound to two pounds of beef is a plausible proportion for the period.
- Lean meatAsk for beef chuck at around 85 percent lean, or grind your own from trimmed chuck. Modern "lean ground beef" at 93 percent plus, combined with the omission of the pork, gives a crumbly loaf.
- Cracker crumbsUnsalted soda crackers, crushed fine; roughly two dozen or so will give a cup of crumbs, though it varies with the cracker. Dry breadcrumbs work too.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve. Pressed juices of this sort were common in period seasoning; the usual explanation offered is that they season without leaving wet pieces in the loaf.
- Covering and bastingThe recipe as printed says to cover the pan and baste occasionally during baking. If you want a browned top, uncover for the last twenty minutes or so and baste then.
- Yield and restingSix to eight servings. Let the loaf stand 10 minutes before slicing or it will break apart; it also slices cleanly cold the next day.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks what to do with hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product that had no place in any existing kitchen tradition. Its "Calendar of Dinners" assigned a full menu to every day of the year, and each recipe worked Crisco in somewhere he butther the butter or drippings an older cookbook would have used to enrich the loaf and to baste it. Beef loaf itself was already an established American economy dish, a way to stretch tougher cuts through the meat grinder that is generally said to have spread through American households in the late nineteenth century; the lemon juice and onion juice are the marks of the Boston Cooking School style of seasoning, which favored extracts and pressed juices over visible aromatics.