How to Make Real Meatloaf

The choir had its gala dinner and silent auction last night, the group’s major annual fundraising event. As usual, it was a lot of fun, though turnout seemed less dense than it has been in past years. I purchased a place in a hike up  near Sedona, complete with gourmet lunch and good company. It would cost more in gasoline alone for me to go up there on my own. Sure hope the plantar fascitis and sciatica have cleared up by next April, when this junket takes place.

The party’s theme was 1950s cruising. Accordingly, the caterer came up with an approximation of 1950s cuisine, but featuring a 21st-century twist. They served up meatloaf made with Kobe beef.

😀

LOL! In the 1950s, no one this side of Tokyo had ever heard of Kobe anything. Certainly not in Phoenix, where the term “bread” meant Wonderbread and “cheese” meant Kraft slices. When we moved here in the 1960s, literally you could not buy a decent piece of cheese in a grocery store, and if you wanted a loaf of bread with anything resembling a flavor (other than caraway seeds), you had to go to the kosher bakery.

My mother made a great meatloaf. IMHO, the highest and best use of meatloaf is as a sandwich filling, served cold a day or two after the meatloaf is cooked. But some like it hot.

You need:

• about a pound of ground chuck or ground round, decidedly not of the Kobe variety (meatloaf is working man’s food!)
• one onion, chopped
• one stalk of celery, chopped
• one or two pieces of grocery-store white bread
• salt and pepper
• maybe a little garlic salt or garlic powder
• an egg
• butter or vegetable oil
• one small can of tomato sauce
• 1/2 small can of tomato paste

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Grease a bread loaf pan liberally with butter or vegetable oil (my mother favored Mazola).

In a bowl or mixing cup, combine the tomato sauce and half a can of tomato paste; with a fork, stir these together well.

Place the meat in a large mixing bowl. Tear one or two pieces of low-rent bread into small pieces and add these to the meat.

Skim the bottom of a frying pan with a little vegetable oil. Add the chopped onion and celery and cook over medium-high heat until the onion is translucent. Then add the vegetables to the meat and bread in the mixing bowl. Add some salt and pepper, as seems appropriate. If you’re using the optional garlic salt, you can add about 1/4 teaspoon of that; if garlic powder, use about 1/8 teaspoon. Add the egg, too — just crack it into the bowl with the other stuff; no need to beat it.

Take a fork and toss the meat, veggies, egg, and bread together until they’re well mixed. But don’t smush them or overdo the stirring. Just gently stir them together so everything is distributed evenly.

Transfer the meat mixture into the baking pan. Pat it down so it fits smoothly and has a nice rounded top. Spread the tomato sauce over the top (the more the better: IMHO, the tomato sauce topping is what makes meatloaf edible…).

Place the meatloaf into the oven and cook about an hour or an hour & 15 minutes. Remove it from the oven and let it stand on the counter to set up while you’re finishing the rest of the dinner. This stuff was typically served with things like green beans, carrots, mashed potatoes, and green salad. Or Jell-O salad. Jell-O salads were big in the good old days. That’s why we apply the word “good” with a degree of irony.

The mixture is pretty forgiving where ingredients are concerned. The whole point of mixing bread with hamburger was to extend the meat, so as to make it feed more people or last longer as leftovers. The egg is there to make the stuff hold together. You can have less meat and more bread. You can use two eggs instead of one.

You can add other stuff, such as ground pork or sausage, ground veal, parsley, real garlic, chopped bell pepper, mushrooms, and the like. You can dollop catsup over the top instead of tomato sauce. You can use all tomato paste or all canned tomato sauce, depending on what you have on hand. You can add pitted olives to the topping, or mix horrible pimiento olives into the meatloaf itself. Some people would add herbs: my mother’s idea of herbs was pretty much limited to dried parsley, thyme, marjoram, rosemary, and oregano, very typical of the average 1950s middle-class cook. None of these add much interest to this particular dish. Summer savory will work pretty well in meatloaf, but in those days we’d never heard of the stuff. I think some women would add a little cream or milk to the meat mixture. Instead of the tomato topping, some people would place a few pieces of raw bacon over the top before sticking the meatloaf into the oven. Whatever rings your chimes, that’s what goes into meatloaf.

Even, I suppose, Kobe beef. 🙂

Image: Meatloaf with sauce. Renee Comet. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Public domain.