Amy Cray

My great grandmother taught me how to make meatloaf. I would pull up her turquoise stepstool to the formica counter and crack each egg perfectly and measure each tablespoon out exactly as I was told because you do not mess with your great grandmother at any point in time. Sure, she chain smokes and can’t always keep track of which generation she’s talking to, but she lets you watch Solid Gold whenever you want and cook in a method that involves squishing ground meat with your bare hands and you can’t beat that with a stick.

Cooking in my family sadly involved standard canned ingredients and copious amounts of Miracle Whip. Whatever recipe we used for meatloaf did involve eggs and milk and ground meat but the similarities to the kind I make now end there. Good lord, I probably wouldn’t still have a beating heart if I lived off the kind of food my family ate in those years. Instead, we love a good old fashioned Country Meatloaf, which is decidedly healthier and absolutely Velveeta free.

I have always assumed that the Meatloaf is just a convoluted American version of a French Terrine. A terrine typically combines layered and rough-chopped meats and lard, and is pressed into a loaf pan and cooked in a water bath, thereby forming an oily sliceable “chunky pate”. I am fascinated by the way various cultures figure out ways to make cheaper cuts of meat come out tasty and of a nice consistency, and terrines and meatloaves are no exception. The French peasants of the late 1700’s and the American housewives of the 1950’s have something in common here. It’s not haute by any stretch. But to many families, it’s soul food.

I’m not a recipe-posting kind of gal, and I hope you won’t mind that. I rarely use recipes at all, and instead sort it out by feel and taste as I go. Luckily the fun thing about meatloaf is that you don’t really need a recipe. It’s probably best to follow one the first time just to get a rough idea of the ideal consistency for when you’re mixing the dry and wet ingredients BUT keep confident in the fact that you really can’t screw it up as long as you follow a basic plan. Hence, my great grandmother’s heavy reliance on the dish.

The general idea of country meatloaf is that in addition to the traditional ingredients: ground meat (pork, beef or turkey), breadcrumbs, egg, milk and a healthy dose of tomato paste (or ketchup if you’re going for authenticity), you just add sautéed mirepoix (that’s onion, carrot and celery), thereby turning a senior citizen staple into something with an actual consistency, color and flavor (not to mention a chance at nutrition). If you want to get crazy you can add fresh herbs to the sauté.

After the vegetables have cooled a bit, you’ll toss everything around in a bowl and smash it with your bare hands until combined. Then you’ll season it, form it into a loaf shape and bake until the oils are sputtering and lovely brown edges are forming on the bottom of the pan. At this point you can combine the leftover tomato paste and brown sugar and spread it over the loaf for the final 10 minutes of baking, which will form a sweet yummy glaze and cement your place in 1950’s middle America.