Meatloaf

Mention of a meatloaf recipe in an earlier blog got me thinking about the way my mother used to make it. In the olden days our family ate a lot of smoked shoulder and Spam so a good solid meatloaf was a delicious step up. Lest you think us deprived, lobster was so cheap in the 1950s you could afford to eat three or four chicken lobsters at a time.

Anyway every magazine had recipes for meatloaf often passed on by some famous man's wife. Remember your Leave It to Beaver studies-women in the fifties were inevitably wives and mothers whose sole job was to make the men in their life look good. Yech! Still,  a good meatloaf recipe could make someone who dined nightly on caviar look like a man of the people.

Mom swore her meatloaf recipe came from a White House kitchen of Mamie Eisenhower. It was a pretty standard meatloaf although I think it was our only menu item that called for that exotic recipe ingredient, a dash of Worcestershire Sauce. I think Ketchup was also involved. The secret of the recipe was to include two or three hard-boiled eggs in the middle of the thing and then to cover the top with bacon. This was much better than Spam, but looking back it's no wonder why Ike had heart disease.

By the way, for those of you who read my blog complaining about the lack of wifi access at the Town Hall, I honed those complaining skills in Mom's kitchen moaning about another dinner of Spam. I hear it's considered a delicacy in Hawaii sort of like snails and horse meat in France. Having eaten snails, I have to say they taste better than Spam. Don't know about the horse meat You haven't been able to get it around here since the rationing days of World War II when it was known as "beef."

I searched the universal library for Mamie's recipe, but only found her Million Dollar Fudge. I did find a recipe from another First Lady whose husband was the ultimate Fifties guy. Yup, Pat Nixon had a meatloaf recipe.

PAT NIXON'S MEATLOAF
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup finely chopped onions
2 garlic cloves, minced
3 slices white bead
1 cup milk
2 pounds lean ground beef
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1 teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried marjoram
2 tablespoons tomato puree
2 tablespoons bread crumbs
Grease a 13-by-9-inch baking pan. Melt butter in a saute pan, add garlic and saute until just golden -- do not brown. Let cool.
Dice bread and soak it in milk. In a large mixing bowl, mix ground beef by hand with sauteed onions and garlic and bread pieces. Add eggs, salt, pepper, parsley, thyme and marjoram and mix by hand in a circular motion.
Turn this mixture into the prepared baking pan and pat into a loaf shape, leaving at least one inch of space around the edges to allow fat to run off. Brush the top with the tomato puree and sprinkle with bread crumbs. Refrigerate for 1 hour to allow the flavors to penetrate and to firm up the loaf.
Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Bake meatloaf on lower shelf of oven for 1 hour, or until meat is cooked through. Pour off accumulated fat several times while baking and after meat is fully cooked. Let stand on wire rack for five minutes before slicing. Makes 6 servings.

Add a dash of Worcestershire and some hard-boiled eggs and top it with bacon and you might have something!

By the way kudos to the Republicans for trying to restore Tricky Dicky's reputation by running candidates that are even worse like climate change denier James Inhofe and expert gynecologist Todd Akin. Interesting fact: Akin did go to college. According to Wikipedia he is a graduate of our own Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Bet they aren't putting that in their fundraising brochure. About the only good point Elizabeth Warren has made in her campaign is that a vote for Scott Brown is a vote to make Inhofe head of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee.

OK, women have come a long way since the bad old days of June Cleaver, but also remember in the 1950s both parties had something to offer and bipartisanship was actually possible! Here's my slogan, guys: "Save America, Bake a Meatloaf"