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Beef Omelet
One and one-quarter pounds of raw beef, chopped; one small cupful of crackers rolled fine, two eggs, a tablespoonful of butter, season to taste with pepper, salt and sage. Mix with two tablespoonfuls of milk, make into a roll, put in a tin with a little water to baste with. Cover and bake two hours.
A meatloaf under an older name, and the one thing to change is the clock: an hour of baking at 350F will do what the original asks two hours to do.
- The timingOne and a quarter pounds of chopped beef, formed into a roll, reaches 160F in the centre in about 50 to 60 minutes. Two hours in a covered tin will give you a grey, dry, crumbling loaf. Cook to temperature, not to the clock.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given; the book, like others of its kind, presumably assumed a range judged by feel. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern equivalent for a covered meat roll of this kind; the cover and the water in the pan help keep it from drying.
- "Beef omelet"Nothing in it is an omelet in the modern sense. Some nineteenth-century American household books applied the word to bound, egg-set meat mixtures of this sort, and this one is a bound meat loaf.
- The meat"Raw beef, chopped" means hand-chopped or run through a grinder. Ordinary ground chuck at around 80/20 is the closest match; anything leaner than 90/10 will bake dry, since there is no other fat here beyond a tablespoon of butter.
- CrackersA small cupful of soda or water crackers rolled fine amounts to something a little under a cup of crumbs, on the order of 2 1/2 to 3 ounces. Unsalted saltines are the nearest survivor; season with a lighter hand if you use salted ones.
- SageLeft to taste, but dried rubbed sage is assertive. Half a teaspoon for this quantity of meat is a sensible starting point; a full teaspoon will dominate.
- The tin and the bastingA shallow tin with a little water in the bottom, covered, is essentially a covered roaster. A loaf pan works, but the roll shape in a shallow pan browns better once you take the cover off for the last ten minutes.
- YieldServes about four as a breakfast or supper dish, and it slices more cleanly cold the next day than hot from the oven.
The binding of chopped meat with cracker crumbs, egg and milk belongs to the same family as forcemeat, adapted to frugal domestic use, and the use of cracker crumbs rather than bread crumbs is characteristically American: soda crackers were a cheap, shelf-stable pantry item in a way that fresh bread for crumbing was not. Cold sliced meat loaves had a place on the American breakfast and supper table into the twentieth century, when breakfast was more often a substantial cooked meal. The name "omelet" for such a mixture is a period usage now lost; dishes titled veal omelet appear in household books of the same era and are likewise loaves.