Home › Breakfast Dishes › Pork and Beef Omelet
Pork and Beef Omelet
Two pounds of chopped beef and one-half pound of chopped pork mixed together; add two eggs, a small onion, a pinch of sage, salt and pepper. Soak in water three slices of dry bread. Squeeze out and add to the other mixture. Mix well together, make into a roll and bake.
This is a meatloaf in all but name, written for a cook who needed no oven dial and no thermometer. The gaps are the oven temperature and the time, so both have to be supplied.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. A roll of this size, roughly 2 1/2 lb of raw mixture, takes about an hour to an hour and a quarter; go by internal temperature rather than the clock, 160F at the centre for a mixture containing pork.
- "Omelet" hereSome nineteenth-century American cookbooks applied "omelet" to egg-bound meat mixtures; "veal omelet" is the familiar example. Nothing about this dish resembles a folded egg omelet; expect a firm sliceable loaf.
- The bread is structuralSoaked and squeezed bread is a panade, and it helps keep the chopped beef from baking dry. Use plain white bread that has genuinely gone stale, and wring it out well so the loaf does not turn pasty.
- Chopped, not ground"chopped beef" in this period could mean meat put through a hand grinder or worked with a chopping knife, and was likely coarser than a modern fine grind. Ask for a coarse grind, or pulse chuck yourself; the half pound of pork presumably supplies fat, so do not substitute lean loin.
- Season the pinch honestlyFor this quantity, allow about 1 1/2 teaspoons salt, 1/2 teaspoon pepper and 1/2 teaspoon dried sage. Dried sage is much stronger than the fresh leaves a period cook might have had at the door, so the "pinch" instruction should be read conservatively.
- Shaping and the panThe original says only "make into a roll and bake"; forming a free-standing roll on a shallow baking pan rather than pressing it into a loaf tin will brown the exterior on all sides. Fry a teaspoonful of the mixture first to check the seasoning, since the raw mix cannot be tasted.
- YieldServes six to eight hot, and it slices cleanly cold the next day.
Loaves of chopped meat bound with egg and softened bread appear in American cookery from around the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and they belong to the same thrift as hash and rissoles: yesterday's roast, or cheap cuts from the butcher, stretched with bread. The pork appears to be doing a specific job here, supplying the fat that lean beef lacks, a pairing that also underlies the later commercial "meatloaf mix" of beef, pork and veal. Such dishes were often served at breakfast as well as at dinner, and sage is a seasoning shared with breakfast sausage.