Meat Cakes
1 lb. round steak. 3 tablespoonfuls melted Crisco 3 small onions 1 tablespoonful chopped parsley 2 eggs ¼ lb. grated cheese 2 cupfuls breadcrumbs Salt, pepper, and paprika to taste Tomato sauce Meats 4 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 carrot 1 turnip 2 onions 3 tablespoonfuls flour 2 cupfuls stock
What survives here is the ingredient list, and a scrambled one at that: the method has dropped out in transcription, and so has the meat itself. Read it as a shopping list for a leftover-meat cake with a brown vegetable sauce, and supply the technique from experience.
- The missing meatDespite the title, no meat is listed. Cakes of this type generally started from cold cooked meat — beef, lamb, or veal from a roast — chopped or put twice through the mincer; something on the order of a pound would suit the eggs, crumbs, cheese, onion and parsley given here.
- "14 lb. grated cheese"This is an OCR misreading of ¼ lb., about 4 oz or roughly a cup of grated hard cheese. A quarter pound is in proportion to two cups of crumbs; fourteen pounds is not.
- Two recipes run togetherThe block after "Tomato sauce" and the stray word "Meats" — Crisco, carrot, turnip, onions, flour, stock — does not belong to the cakes. It reads as a separate brown or vegetable sauce whose own heading has been lost in the transcription: vegetables sweated in the fat, flour cooked in to make a roux, stock added and simmered down.
- CriscoStill sold, and still a hydrogenated-type vegetable shortening, though reformulated over the years to cut trans fats. Any neutral solid shortening, or butter and oil, does the same work in the mixture and in the pan.
- BreadcrumbsDry crumbs from stale bread, not the sandy commercial kind and not panko. Two cups of dry crumbs to a pound of meat gives a firm, sliceable cake; if the mixture will not hold a shape when pressed, add crumbs rather than more egg.
- Cooking the cakesShape into flat rounds about ¾ inch thick, chill them for half an hour so they hold, and fry in shallow fat over moderate heat until well browned on both sides — six to eight minutes in all. The meat is already cooked; the object is crust, not doneness.
- YieldOn the quantities implied, eight to ten cakes, serving four with the sauce and a vegetable.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written for Procter & Gamble by Marion Harris Neil, then cookery editor of Ladies' Home Journal, to teach American cooks what to do with a product introduced in 1911: a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening that behaved like lard but came from a factory rather than a hog. The book's several hundred recipes are ordinary household cookery with Crisco written into every one of them, which is why a modest dish of minced-meat cakes opens with three tablespoonfuls of melted shortening. Cakes or croquettes of this kind were a fixture of the thrifty table long before Crisco existed — a way of turning Sunday's cold roast into Tuesday's hot dinner with crumbs, egg and a sauce made from the stockpot — and their appearance here shows the new fat being sold not as a novelty but as a drop-in replacement in food people already made every week.