Yesterday Funny emitted a recipe for genuine 1950s meatloaf, the elixir of the working class. As I mentioned then, IMHO the best use of meatloaf is to stuff a sandwich. Meatloaf is the same variety of chow as pâté and liverwurst (which my father used to call “the worst of the liver” :-D): low-end food designed to fill hungry bellies and stretch dollars. As such, it makes a truly great lunchbox ingredient.
Personally, I think the best of all possible meatloaf sandwiches is made with home-made white bread; a close runner-up is sourdough bread. Try to avoid whole wheat bread: too healthy. Spoils the whole point of this exercise.
Slap a piece of bread on the counter. Cover it liberally with your favorite mustard. I favor Dijon types, but a good ball-park yellow will do the job handsomely.
Not spicy enough for you? What the heck: add a layer of horseradish. Slap another piece of bread on the counter next to the first one, and slather that one with plenty of ketchup.
Take last night’s leftover meatloaf out of the refrigerator and slice off a chunk. Size depends on how hungry you are now or how hungry you think you will be during your lunch break on the job. Place this on one of the bread slices.
Think you should have a vegetable? Break off a piece of lettuce from the head in the fridge and place that on top of the meatloaf. It’s optional, though, and may be too healthy for good sense. Remember, Ronald Reagan taught us that ketchup is a vegetable. Now take the other slice of bread and place it on top of the mound you’ve created…with the condiment side down, of course. Slice the sandwich in half, if you like.
Serve with a dill pickle spear (another vegetable!) and a mound of potato chips (more vegetables!).
Now you have a nutritious and tasty lunch.
Image: Actual bread. Real home-made bread, that is. Project Manhattan. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Ah the delicious ethnic food of my homeland (WASP suburbia). We treated salt as a side-dish, ketchup was both a vegetable and a spicy condiment, and my dad refused to eat anything that ended in a vowel, other than potato. Meatloaf was stretched with oatmeal, not bread, but more or less the same idea. And yes, two days later, cold in sandwiches, was the preferred mode of consumption.
Oatmeal…good idea! Sets up like cat food when it gets cold: perfect for congealing the hamburg into a loaf.
Actually, I think I recall my mother putting rice in it once.