My Gran’s meatloaf was terrible. It was the worst meatloaf in the world. She’d make it every other week and every time I would cut it up into small pieces and mix it with my mashed potatoes just to make it somewhat palatable. Still, it remained a staple on her weeknight dinner menu because my Paps claimed to love it.
Gran was an amazing cook, despite her meatloaf shortcoming. Born and raised in small-town Pennsylvania, she was brought up on classic Pennsylvania-Dutch cooking and I’m grateful she brought so much of it to East Tennessee. Her open-face turkey sandwiches were my favorite, but she was also a master of potato “filling” and made a beautiful salisbury steak.
Watching her cook is also what initially inspired me to take an interest in the hobby. She taught me how to fry an egg and let me watch “Great Chefs, Great Cities” on the TV in her bedroom. She and Paps also encouraged me to step into the kitchen and give it a try for myself, something I’m fairly confident they regretted.
One morning I made them eggs that were overcooked, rubbery, and seasoned with an obscene amount of black pepper. The bacon I paired with them came out great, but I cooked it after I had finished my eggs, so by the time I served the food, not only were the eggs inedible, they were also stone cold.
My kitchen skills were an embarrassment, so I stopped developing them for years, not picking up the hobby again until I was in college. My first dish was an attempt at recreating the meal I’d eaten at a hibachi restaurant and it was okay if you look over the fact that I accidentally bought a cucumber instead of a zucchini. My first culinary win was when I made buffalo chicken tenders using pancake batter and some buffalo sauce I’d brought home from the restaurant where I was working at the time. My college girlfriend ended up getting really sick afterward, so it’s almost a loss, but I was okay so I’m not blaming the food.
As an adult, I started taking cooking very seriously. I remember living in my first apartment and learning how to cook chicken breasts in a skillet. I made my first pizza dough there and became the master of following instructions on the back of a box. Before long, I had graduated from beef stroganoff Hamburger Helper to cooking my first beef Wellington, and from throwing frozen vegetables into the oven and calling it “cooking” to making yucca fries with a random find from a farmer’s market in a town I was merely visiting. As my culinary prowess grew, so did my palate – I was beginning to eat foods I thought I hated like pineapple, curry and asparagus. By the time I hit 30, I was in love with cooking and damn good at it.
One of the things I regret in my life is never getting the opportunity to cook a proper meal for my Paps before he passed away. He lived the last decade of his life in a nursing home, which didn’t make it impossible to cook for him but it was more complicated and I just never did it. He went to his grave having never been paid back for choking down that rubbery, pepper-saturated fried egg. Apparently he also admitted to never actually liking Gran’s meatloaf!
My sweet Gran, on the other hand, got to experience my food multiple times. It felt great to prepare her my stuffed chicken parmesan with spaghetti dinner (my speciality at the time) and hear her rave about it in my dining room. She would often moan with pleasure while eating food she enjoyed and hearing those sounds coming from her made me feel as though my debt of poorly prepared food had been paid.
It was during this meal that we started openly talking about her meatloaf. Without provocation, she readily admitted her meatloaf was terrible. It was nice to hear her be a good sport about it but I was also relieved that we could now joke about it in public. I even mentioned it during her eulogy.
To be fair, I just don’t care much for meatloaf anyway so it wasn’t entirely Gran’s fault that her’s was garbage. The word itself grosses me out – a loaf of meat? Meat is something that should never loaf and the very thought of it doing so is disgusting. My mom makes good meatloaf and I’ve always enjoyed it (not just saying that because she’s a reader), but every other meatloaf I’ve ever eaten has led me to situations where I’m trying to find a way to eat as little as possible while not hurting anyone’s feelings.
Meatloaf is a direct descendant of a German dish called panhas. Panhas was a common peasant food that was made of leftovers from pork production – lungs, kidneys, liver, etc. These ingredients were then mashed together with flour and a variety of spices to create a loaf that is then sliced, breaded and fried in lard. Dutch colonists in 17th-century America kept the traditional cuisine around, often referring to it as scrapple.
By the 19th century, Americans were making scrapple with whatever meat they had on hand. Eventually what became known as meatloaf was a popular dinnertime feature, especially during the Great Depression where ingredients needed to be rationed. And while the American meatloaf has its roots in Pennsylvania Dutch culture, there’s something oddly Southern about the dish, presumably due to its rural roots. Any Southern cuisine, barbecue or soul food restaurant you go to will undoubtedly have meatloaf on the menu.
And for whatever reason, people love it.
One of those people is my otherwise perfect wife. She’s been known to order meatloaf platters or meatloaf sandwiches out at restaurants and swoon over how good it is, much to my disgust. She also brags about how she makes an awesome meatloaf but after nearly five years, she still hasn’t made it for me. We each have favorite dishes the other one makes and I’ve mastered some of her other favorites, including lasagna and beef Wellington, but it just didn’t seem fair that I was preventing her from enjoying meatloaf on the regular just because I don’t have a taste for it.
As a man who loves to take care of his wife and loves to make waves in the kitchen, I decided it was finally time to change that. I would need to find a meatloaf recipe that had to be classic enough to scratch her meatloaf itch, unique enough to make it fun to do and tasty enough for me to (hopefully) be able to enjoy it. It was a tall order, but I was up to the task.
The summer prior to this challenge, I upgraded our outdoor grilling equipment, finally trashing my old barrel-style charcoal smoker and installing a kamado-style charcoal grill. I decided that I was going to work really hard on being Pitmaster Firefly and was at it in no time, smoking pork belly, pork chops and chicken legs, then grilling wings, salmon and tomahawk ribeyes. With this passion in my heart, I decided to take on an ambitious meatloaf recipe that would be smoked slow-and-low. It would be stuffed with pepper jack cheese and be topped with a Jack Daniels-based sauce. How could this not be good?
The details of the smoke are not important, but I was able to whip it up and babysit the smoker for the four hours required to cook the meatloaf up to the right temperature. In the meantime, I made some simple mashed potatoes and decided to leave the vegetables I’d planned to roast in the refrigerator. I’m an adult, I can do that.
Moments later, the table was set, the potatoes were served and I sliced thick cuts of our cheese-stuffed whiskey meatloaf, crossing my fingers it was half as good as it looked and praying to the culinary gods that Katie enjoyed it. We took our first bites, and just as the booze-infused sauce touched the back of my tongue, I let out a giggle – one that I’m known to do when I’ve made something I know is delicious. I’d killed it. But what did Katie think?
She complimented the meatloaf after her first bite, but the true impact would be revealed a few bites later. With 3/4 of her meal devoured, she went on a rant that seemingly came out of nowhere about how I show her every day that I meant every word of our vows on our wedding day, even going so far as to say — through tears, no less — if it was possible she’d marry me again that night.
When she finished, I let the silence sit for just a beat before responding, “so you liked the meatloaf?”
Of course, her monologue had nothing to do with the meatloaf and everything to do with the fact that I had paid enough attention to her to know every dish she loved and put so much effort into perfecting it at home despite not caring for it much myself. It wasn’t the dish that mattered, it was the simple effort that made the huge impact.
Maybe it was just a meatloaf, maybe it was just dinner, but to Katie it represented all the reasons she said yes in the first place.
Whether you’re married, dating or just beginning a relationship, I implore you to pay close attention to everything. Be a student. More than anything, discover what the other person’s metaphorical meatloaf is, then learn how to master it.
Whiskey optional, of course, but it probably wouldn’t hurt.
-jtf
First, meatloaf has never been a favorite of mine but I do make it now and then because Jim loves it. He always has high compliments for how I make it and to me, it’s nothing special.
Also, why use ground beef for meatloaf when you can make an incredible burger? 😂