"Betty Crocker's New Dinner for Two Cookbook" - Meat Loaf

Date I made this recipe: October 26, 2008

Betty Crocker’s New Dinner for Two Cookbook by Betty Crocker (of course!)
Published by: General Mills
© 1964 – 11th printing, 1971
Recipe: Meat Loaf – p. 94

People, I love meatloaf and I love Betty Crocker and now I am in love with Betty Crocker’s Meatloaf! This recipe was the best—easy to make and I had almost all ingredients on hand.

Now my mother added raw oats to her meatloaf (made by a company that is a competitor of Big G, Betty’s parent company, and so I won’t mention the name here) and so I was a little skeptical of this recipe as it used bread/breadcrumbs but in the end, no worries. The bread crumbs in milk tasted great and served the purpose of being a binding agent—i.e. that which holds the whole thing together.

In my family, meatloaf sandwiches were our Road Food meal of choice. Every time we got ready to take one of our long-haul trips across America, my mom made a meatloaf a couple days ahead and then sliced it into sandwiches, adding mustard and ketchup to heavily-buttered bread (so it wouldn’t get soggy). It wasn’t long into the trip that we’d break them out and I can remember my dad munching on a sandwich as we crossed the Mackinaw Bridge to Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Sadly, the only time we had the meatloaf was on the first day of our vacation as thereafter, we ended up buying luncheon meat for sandwiches that we assembled picnic-style on the road. To this day, I can still envision the luncheon meat variety pack consisting of olive loaf, pickle and pimento, ham, and some other type of meat that I can’t recall (possibly because I considered it to be unfit for my consumption).

Every day on the road, we would stop at a local grocery story to buy the luncheon meat variety pack along with fruit, Chips Ahoy Cookies (or Fig Newton’s – a favorite of my dad) and sodas (almost always Coke in the original small bottles), throw them in a large, insulated bag that my parents bought with Green Stamps, and head on down the road until we found a suitable place for a picnic. The insulated bag (a larger version of today’s insulated lunch bags that people bring to work) contained mustard, ketchup and bread that we kept on hand and in the car on a daily basis. Although McDonald’s and other fast-food restaurants were on the rise, this was a cheaper way to go (McDonald’s back then was an expensive “treat”) and got us out in the countryside exploring America, state by state, county by county, town by town. These road trips are one of my favorite childhood memories.

So take a trip down your memory lane and make a meatloaf, and if you take a road trip with your kids, consider the meatloaf sandwich. It beats the heck out of McDonald’s any day! (By the way, the ultimate first day of a road trip for me and my brother was eating meatloaf sandwiches in a cozy car when it rained. Yes, we were odd children).

Meat Loaf- 4 servings or two mini meatloaves, just right for two people
½ lb. ground beef or veal
¼ lb. ground lean pork
1 ½ medium slices soft bread, torn in pieces, and ½ cup milk; or ½ cup dry bread crumbs and 2/3 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
2 T. minced onion
½ tsp. salt
1/8 tsp. each pepper, dry mustard, celery salt and garlic salt
1 ½ tsp. Worcestershire sauce
Ketchup

Heat oven to 350. Mix all ingredients thoroughly and shape into 2 loaves. Place loaves in a shallow baking pan, spread with ketchup or your favorite bottled barbecue sauce and bake 1 hour until done.