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Steamed Meat
One pound of ham and one pound of veal chopped together fine; two eggs, one-half cupful of bread crumbs, a little white pepper. Steam three or four hours. 4
This is a steamed potted-meat loaf meant to be chilled, sliced thin and laid between buttered bread. The original assumes a covered mold set in a kettle of simmering water; the method translates directly to a loaf pan in a covered pot or a steamer insert.
- The trailing "4"Its meaning is not clear from the page; it may be a recipe or contributor number, a cross-reference, or a serving count, but it is plainly not part of the ingredient list. Treat the formula as written: 2 lb of meat total.
- Grind, don't cube"Chopped together fine" calls for the ham and veal to be worked to a fine, even texture so the mixture holds together when sliced; the salt from the cured ham helps the meat bind. A food processor in short pulses, or two passes through a meat grinder, gets you there.
- SaltNone is called for because cured ham supplies it. Taste-check by frying a teaspoon of the mixture before you commit the loaf to the steamer.
- The moldPack the mixture tightly into a greased loaf pan or pudding basin and cover with foil or a lid tied on. Uncovered, condensation drips in and the loaf goes watery.
- Steaming setupSet the mold on a rack in a deep pot, add boiling water to reach halfway up the sides, cover, and keep the water at a bare simmer. Top up with boiling water as it evaporates.
- Time, revisedThree to four hours is longer than a modern loaf needs. A 2 lb loaf in a standard pan is done in about 1 1/2 to 2 hours; pull it at 160F on an instant-read thermometer. Longer steaming only dries the veal and makes the texture crumbly.
- Press and chillWeight the loaf with a can or a small brick while it cools, then refrigerate overnight. Cold and compressed, it slices thin without falling apart, which is the whole point for sandwiches.
- YieldRoughly 2 lb of sliceable meat, enough for eight to ten sandwiches. It keeps three or four days refrigerated.
Steamed and potted meats fill the sandwich chapters of American cookbooks from roughly the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth, and for a reason usually given as practical: before home refrigeration was common, a densely packed loaf of cooked, well-salted meat was among the forms in which meat kept a few days and could be carried in a lunch pail. The ham-and-veal pairing is a common one, veal being cheap, mild and gelatinous enough to set firm while the cure in the ham does the seasoning. The same logic can be seen, by analogy rather than documented descent, in British veal-and-ham pie and the German-American "ham loaf": lean meat plus cured meat plus a binder of egg and crumbs. Steaming rather than roasting keeps the loaf pale and moist, and it is often suggested that it also avoided heating a whole oven, which would have mattered when the oven was part of a coal range.