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Ham and Beef Loaf
One pound of beef, one pound of ham, chopped fine; two eggs, one-half cupful rolled crackers, one-half cupful of milk, pepper and salt to taste. Bake in a moderate oven one and one-quarter hours.
A plain forcemeat loaf of the kind Victorian and Edwardian books kept in the sandwich chapter: baked, cooled overnight, then sliced thin for bread and butter. A few of its instructions assume equipment and ingredients that have shifted.
- Moderate oven350F. At that temperature a two-pound loaf will take roughly the stated hour and a quarter, though the pan shape matters more than the clock.
- Cook to temperature, not timeGround beef needs an internal temperature of 160F. Check the centre with an instant-read thermometer rather than trusting the hour and a quarter, especially if you pack the mixture into a deep narrow pan.
- Rolled crackersSoda or water crackers crushed with a rolling pin, not sweet cookies. Half a cupful is roughly 1.5 to 2 oz depending on how finely they are crushed; unseasoned dry breadcrumbs or panko can stand in.
- Salt with careIf your ham is cured, as most supermarket ham is, it brings a great deal of salt with it. Season the beef only lightly and taste a small fried spoonful of the mixture before committing the whole loaf.
- "Chopped fine"The original means hand-chopped or run through a hand mincer, which leaves a coarser, more open texture than modern ground meat. A few pulses in a food processor, or a butcher's coarse grind, gets closer than pre-packaged mince.
- The panA standard 9x5 loaf tin, greased. Shaped free-form on a baking sheet instead, the loaf gets more browned surface and bakes faster.
- Yield and servingAbout two pounds of loaf, eight to ten servings hot, or enough for a dozen sandwiches. For sandwich use, chill it thoroughly overnight under a weight; a warm loaf crumbles under the knife.
Sandwich chapters in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks lean heavily on cold sliceable meat, because that is what a sandwich was before commercial sliced bread and delicatessen counters: something the household had baked or boiled itself and was carving down over several days. Combining fresh beef with cured ham is an economy as much as a flavouring, the ham supplying salt, colour and preservative character to a mixture that would otherwise be bland and grey. Loaves of this sort are close relatives of the potted and pressed meats that fill earlier books, and they bear a resemblance, rather than any established lineage, to the German fleischkase and the veal-and-ham pies of English tradition; the crackers-and-milk panade is a common American substitute for the breadcrumb panada. The recipe's brevity is typical of the genre, which assumed a cook who already knew what a loaf pan was and how long her own oven ran hot.