Once Upon a Meatloaf
Exclusive Excerpt + Recipe from Frank Bruni & Jennifer Steinhauer
Once upon a meatloaf, two perpetually busy, uncommonly hungry New York Times writers discovered that they shared a kitchen passion.
They were talking about eating, which was a favorite sport of theirs. They were talking about cooking, which they did at disparate skill levels. One of the writers, a woman, was as fearless at the stove as she was at City Hall, where she routinely grilled the mayor. She could whip up practical meals for her picky kids one minute and impractical feasts for sophisticated friends the next. The other writer, a man, was once the newspaper’s chief restaurant critic and knew his way around a dozen ethnic cuisines, but he was shy with a spatula, timid with tongs and all nerves in front of the food processor. To pulse or not to pulse? He could stand there for an hour, dithering instead of dicing.
“Is there any dish that you feel confident about?” she asked him.
“Just one,” he confided. But then he paused, because he was sure that what he was about to divulge would shame him. Few if any of the restaurants he appraised had it on their menus.
“You can tell me,” she said.
He apologized that the dish wasn’t fancy.
He apologized that it wasn’t some farm-to-table wonder, dependent on the seasons, resplendent with obscure vegetables.
He apologized that he was apologizing.
And then he talked about ground chuck, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, brown sugar and how his mother mingled these in an entree that was the quintessence of comfort, at least if comfort includes bread crumbs.
He talked about an analogue to it that he’d more or less invented, comprising ground lamb, feta, fresh mint and more.
He talked about mixing these with his hands and molding them with his fingers.
“Meatloaf,” he said. “I make meatloaf.”
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t sneer. She beamed, nodding so fast and hard that he feared for her neck. Almost instantly, they began discussing the sturdy virtues of ground pork. They moved on to the debatable utility of ground veal. And ground turkey: Was it truly viable, or was it the great white whale of meatloaves?
The next thing they knew — the next thing we knew — we were in meatloaf love.
So consider this book a love story, written in the special language of our relationship, with its vocabulary of ounces and tablespoons, of lightly beaten eggs and coarsely grated cheese, of cayenne pepper and smoked paprika.
It reflects a decade’s worth of weekly and sometimes daily conversations distinguished by abrupt topic shifts and abundant non-sequiturs. On the phone, we’ll do fifteen minutes of office gossip (“I hear they’re yanking him from Europe”) followed abruptly by five minutes on meatloaf moistening (“Have you tried soaking the bread in whole milk?”). In a given series of e-mails, we’ll toggle from Senate filibusters to sautéed shiitakes, from Obamacare to oregano. Always we snap back to meatloaf. It’s our default setting. It’s our North Star. We’ve exchanged recipes for it by text, by instant messenger, by Google chat.
We’ve also exchanged recipes with colleagues, friends and celebrated chefs, many of whom — including Mario Batali, Bobby Flay, April Bloomfield and Alex Guarnaschelli — shared their favorites with us for inclusion in this book. And we have discovered in the process that everybody has his or her own meatloaf story, meatloaf sensibility, meatloaf biases. Meatloaf is the most personal of dishes, and the most autobiographical. Show us a person’s meatloaf and we’ll show you that person’s soul.
Meatloaf is mirror: You are how you loaf.
Meatloaf is metaphor: It’s life made loaf. You take what’s precious (in this case, the meat) and stretch it as far as it’ll go. And you learn that there are infinite ways to do this, an embarrassment of options. You need only flex your imagination. You need only raid the cupboard. Do you bring in the exotic? Incorporate some fire? Meatloaf is a yardstick for your daring, a referendum on your imagination, a judge of your loyalty to precedent, an arbiter of your regard for the classics.
Just as you can paper over your own flaws and smooth out your own shortcomings, you can redeem your meatloaf with split-second inspiration, last-minute epiphanies. You can improvise. You can adjust.
Is the meat mixture you’re about to mold too weepy? Bread crumbs are your emotional caulk. Too dry? Another egg is your calmative. Bland? That’s why the universe created hot sauce, and that’s why it created so many of them: Tabasco, Sriracha, salsa picante. They speak in different dialects. They make different meatloaves. And when all else fails, add bacon. This is true in life, and this is true in loaf.
Meatloaf is spontaneity itself, and more than any other dish, it brings out the kid in the adult, repurposing child’s play as mature, purposeful activity.
Did you ever have one of those at-home chemistry sets with different liquids and different powders that you could combine in countless ways, for countless hues? Meatloaf is its kitchen cousin. Ever burrowed your fingers into Play-Doh? Meatloaf is its kin, best sculpted with bare hands. It’s mischief made protein. It’s fun that actually feeds.
It’s as forgiving as a laid-back god. One egg or two? This matters less than you might think. A few dashes too much vinegar? The Earth will continue spinning, and your meatloaf will be just fine. You needn’t be as punctilious with your measuring cups and spoons as you are when making pastry. You can guesstimate. You can round. It’s all being absorbed into something greater, all going into the oven and will all work itself out.
There’s not a recipe among the dozens here that you should feel exactingly yoked to and irrevocably bound by. Don’t mess with the fundamental ratios of meat to its binders and moisteners. Don’t take extravagant liberties with the cooking times. Don’t get glaze-happy and wind up with soup. But otherwise, you can dial up the spices if that’s your druthers, swap out bread crumbs for crackers if you’re feeling the itch. We can’t promise a result that’ll be as wholly pleasing as the one you’ll achieve with recipe fidelity, but we can predict that you’ll wind up with something sufficiently satisfying — and all your own.
Because meatloaf is customizable. It allows for a personal stamp. It can be ambitious or humble, its flexibility demonstrated by its ability to bridge the two of us and by this book’s recipes, most of them easily mastered but a few of them more challenging and time-consuming. You can dress meatloaf up or you can dress it down. You can treat it like royalty or treat it like a ragamuffin. We go in both directions, allowing it to experiment with eclectic costumes and an array of accents.
We turn it into the Meryl Streep of comfort food.
That’s not hard to do, because the meatloaf tradition is a global one. You find meatloaf on just about every continent (we’re hedging here, because we can’t swear to Antarctica) and in scores of countries, at least if you acknowledge, for example, that a meatball is to a meatloaf as a sapling is to a tree: It just hasn’t grown and realized its full potential. In that sense Middle Eastern kibbeh (or kibbe or kebbah, depending on the region) is related to meatloaf, an example of the impulse to grind meat and then extend and amplify it in ways that also bind it into a shape that holds together. Kibbe are balls, tiny torpedoes or even patties of, typically, ground lamb or ground beef with minced onions, cracked wheat, maybe sautéed pine nuts and various spices. What does that resemble? A meatloaf.
And what’s a fine French pâté or terrine, really, but a meatloaf in shrunken, silken, delicate drag? It starts with meat and puts it through a drill fundamentally similar to the grinding, binding and seasoning that lead to meatloaf. In their book Charcuterie, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn refer to pâté as “the Cinderella meat loaf,” by which they mean the young woman in a ball gown before midnight, not the sooty chimney sweeper of the morning after.
A meatloaf is a pâté minus its glass slippers.
Meatloaf in its larger, truer form exists in Vietnam, where it’s boiled and called gio. It exists in South Africa, where it’s animated by curry (and, sometimes, dried fruit) and called bobotie. Chileans often put hard-boiled eggs in their meatloaves. So do Italians and Germans. Meatloaf enjoys particular popularity in Scandinavia and other parts of northern Europe, including Sweden; there are culinary anthropologists who see a link between the modern meatloaf and the Swedish meatball. What you’re snacking on at IKEA isn’t merely a post-shopping canapé. It’s a miniature meatloaf.
But where did it all begin? How far into the past must we travel to see, on the culinary horizon, the meatloaf lumbering into view?
There are various theories. There are competing histories, including the belief that meatloaf, or its closest antecedent, emerged in medieval Europe, around the fifth century, in a Mediterranean dish of finely diced meat scraps joined with fruits, nuts and seasonings. From that moment on, meatloaf in its many iterations and guises was often a sort of culinary scrap heap, a refuge for leftovers, in the spirit of many casseroles and of shepherd’s pie. It was a way to stretch protein. It was a way to use up excess vegetables. It was a ragtag orchestra of ingredients on the verge of expiration. And it made music more uplifting than anyone could have anticipated.
Americans embraced it with more fondness and fervor than perhaps anyone else, to a point where it’s often mentioned alongside hot dogs and hamburgers as one of the country’s iconic dishes and essential comfort foods. Its narrative in this country includes an early chapter set in colonial times, when German immigrants made scrapple, an amalgam of ground pork and cornmeal that established the meat-starch union at the core of most meatloaves.
The first recorded recipe for the modern American meatloaf is from the late 1870s, according to the food historian Andrew Smith, who told us that it instructed the cook to finely chop “whatever cold meat you have.” That meat, he said, would likely be beef, because New Englanders killed their cows before winter, when feeding them would prove more difficult, and tried to take full advantage of every last bit of the meat, looking for uses for the cheap cuts. Meatloaf was such a use. To the chopped beef they added pepper, salt, onion, slices of milk-soaked bread and egg. You’ll find these very ingredients and steps in many a meatloaf recipe today. But back then, Smith said, meatloaf wasn’t for dinner. It was for breakfast.
From the late 1800s, a meatloaf-esque recipe for ground veal with bread crumbs and eggs appeared in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. But the profile of meatloaf rose to a whole new level in the 1890s, with the spread of industrial-scale meatpacking, which created scraps aplenty. Scraps were best chopped or ground and softened and seasoned, and that’s precisely what happened to them in a burger, in a meatball and in the most physically imposing member of this culinary family: the meatloaf. The meatloaf was a home not just for scraps but for spices that connected it to the cook’s epicurean ancestry. One old American recipe combined veal, ham and bread crumbs with grated nutmeg, mace, cayenne and lemon rind for a decidedly French flavor profile. This loaf was covered with an egg wash and crushed crackers.
Meatloaf became a staple of many Americans’ diets during the Depression, because it helped home cooks extend precious protein farther than it might otherwise go, so that more people could be fed with less meat. By then meat grinders were common and meat grinding less difficult, two developments that helped to popularize meatloaf. In the 1940s meatloaf was an emblem of wartime ingenuity; this was the era of Penny Prudence’s “Vitality Loaf,” made with beef, pork and liver. The Culinary Arts Institute published a recipe for Savory Meat Loaf that called for beef, vegetable soup and cereal.
By the 1950s, meatloaf was here to stay.
Betty Crocker had recipes, which home cooks tweaked. A 1958 book, 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger, included seventy recipes for meatloaf, and while you won’t find nearly that many here, that’s because some of those seventy went a bit wild, advocating smashed bananas, for example, or ketchup-filled peach halves. (We’ve exercised more restraint.) Meatloaf became an expected option at American diners. It never made inroads like that into upscale restaurants, but every now and then, an ambitious chef will sneak it onto his or her menu, either presenting it in some exalted form or keeping it simple and serving it as an act of nostalgia, as a gesture of respect for a food that so ably sustained Americans through hard times.
We both feel that when we cook meatloaf, we’re connected to something bigger: a tradition, a time line. Meatloaf is elemental. It’s enduring. And if comfort foods are those that are not only an answer to hunger but also an existential balm, served without undue fuss or expensive implements, then meatloaf rules the category. It reigns supreme.
It’s the fluffy caftan of comfort foods.
Mario Batali’’s Stuffed Meatloaf
Serves 6 generously
Mario Batali needs no introduction, and his recipe for meatloaf is exactly what you might expect — richly flavored, intensely meaty,
Italian-leaning and requiring a bit of skill and patience.
This is in some sense a classic rolled loaf, with meat encasing meat, swimming in juices emanating from meat. Unlike many meatloaves, which are inherently budget-friendly, this one uses high-quality ingredients that greatly increase its expense. You want to buy good cheese, a caciocavallo if possible, and you want really nice prosciutto. The rolling of the meat is exciting and fun; just be sure you make it good and tight so it does not spread too much as it cooks. The pan juices make for a lovely, if slightly odd-colored, gravy. Embrace the difference!
This is a very rich loaf, and you will want a nice big salad or vegetable side to go with it. Then, a nap.
2 large carrots, peeled and cut into narrow strips about 12 inches long
1 pound lean ground beef
1 pound ground pork
1 1/2 cups fresh bread crumbs
1 cup freshly grated pecorino cheese (about 3 ounces)
3 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper plus more to taste
2 cups frozen spinach, thawed, squeezed dry and chopped
6 thin slices proscuitto (about 4 ounches)
1/4 pound sliced caciocavallo or provolone cheese
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 sprigs fresh rosemary
1 cup dry red wine
1 — Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
2 — Fill a medium-sized saucepan with salted water and bring it to a boil over high heat. Add the carrots and cook until tender, about 7 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the carrots to a plate.
3 — In a large bowl, combine the beef with the pork, 1 cup of the bread crumbs, the pecorino, the eggs, 1 teaspoon salt and 1/2 teaspoon pepper; mix well with your clean hands.
4 — Line a work surface with a 15-inch-long sheet of plastic wrap. In a bowl, mix the flour with the remaining ó cup bread crumbs. Sprinkle the crumb mixture all over the plastic wrap. Transfer the meatloaf mixture to the crumb-lined plastic wrap, and press it into a 12-by-10-inch rectangle, about 1/2 inch thick. Lay the spinach over the meat, making sure it is evenly distributed, leaving a 1-inch border on the short sides.
5 — Arrange the carrots over the spinach, and top with the prosciutto and sliced cheese. Starting from the long end of the plastic wrap closest to you, tightly roll up the meatloaf, tucking in the filling and using the plastic wrap to guide you; then discard the plastic wrap. Drizzle the meat loaf with the olive oil.
6 — Put the rosemary sprigs in the bottom of a broiler pan and pour in the red wine. Cover with the broiler pan grate. Set the meatloaf on top of the grate. Bake for 35 minutes. Then turn the pan around and pour 1/2 cup of water through the grate. Continue baking for about 20 minutes longer, until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the center of the loaf registers 165 degrees F. Remove the pan and let the loaf rest, uncovered, for 10 minutes.
7 — Discard any cheese from the bottom of the pan and strain the pan juices into a small saucepan. Boil the pan juices over high heat until reduced to 1 cup, about 5 minutes. Pour into a serving bowl and season with salt and pepper.
8 — Using a serrated knife, slice the loaf into 1-inch-thick slices and serve, passing the pan juices at the table.
For more, check out A Meatloaf in Every Oven by Frank Bruni & Jennifer Steinhauer. Published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2017 Frank Bruni & Jennifer Steinhauer.
