Meatloaf was not born a dinner. The first recorded recipe for modern North American meatloaf dates to the late 1870s, according to Wikipedia, and the dish was originally a breakfast food.
It went on to feed families through the Great Depression and two wars, with a pantry cracker or a slice of bread stretching the meat, and its family tree runs back to the scrapple of colonial Pennsylvania.
The Late 1870s: A Breakfast Loaf
Wikipedia’s meat loaf article says meatloaf in the contemporary American sense did not appear in cookbooks until the late 19th century. The first recorded recipe, from the late 1870s, had cooks chopping whatever meat was on hand, likely beef, and mixing it with salt, pepper, onion, egg and bread soaked in milk. It was originally a breakfast food.
Other accounts point to slightly earlier dates. The food history site Grub Americana says the St. Joseph Gazette of Missouri published what it calls the first known recipe for modern American meatloaf on May 12, 1875. It adds that meatloaf appeared in the National Cookery Book in 1876, and on the menu of Gilmore’s Pork House in Rock Island, Illinois, as reported by the Rock Island Argus.
Food Republic agrees on the decade. Its history of meatloaf says the first recipe resembling the modern dish dates to the 1870s and used chopped cold meat, spices, milk-soaked bread and eggs. So the record points to the 1870s, with the exact year depending on the source.
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Cookbooks Catch On
Once the loaf was in print, the recipes multiplied. Grub Americana lists recipes in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1886 and in a San Francisco Call recipe in 1890. A Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, newspaper that year printed a recipe calling for soda crackers and labeled the loaf suitable for a “working man’s bucket.”
The Fannie Farmer Cookbook included meatloaf recipes in 1896, and the Settlement House Cookbook did so in 1903, the site says. Food Republic adds that the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book included a veal version in the late 19th century.
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Scrapple: The Colonial Cousin
Wikipedia says North American meatloaf is said to descend from scrapple, a ground pork and cornmeal dish that German-Americans in Pennsylvania served since colonial times, though it flags that claim as needing a better source. The scrapple article says German colonists who settled near Philadelphia and Chester County created the first recipes in the 17th and 18th centuries, based on the Low German dish panhas.
The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia says scrapple is a loaf of cooked pig parts thickened with cornmeal or buckwheat and usually seasoned with sage and pepper, sliced, fried and often served with syrup as a breakfast side. It says the dish was called scrapple, at least in print, by the 1820s. In 1863, Joshua Habersett opened Habersett Pork Products in Middletown Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the first company to mass-produce it.
The encyclopedia also cites Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s Domestic Cookery of 1869, which called for 8 pounds of pork scraps, 4 gallons of water, a quart of cornmeal and buckwheat flour for thickening. North Carolina State’s extension office, in a post on National Scrapple Day, notes that cornmeal is a New World ingredient and that the name appeared in print by the mid-1820s.
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Depression Budgets and Saltines
The Great Depression turned the loaf into a necessity. Wikipedia says families used meatloaf then to stretch their food budgets with cheap meat and leftovers, and cooks added cereal grains, bread or saltine crackers for bulk. Grub Americana dates the Depression to 1929 through 1941 and says cheap meals and leftovers made meatloaf a necessity.
The wider context was bleak. The history site The Collector reports that unemployment reached 25% by 1933 and that cooks bulked up stews and soups with rice and pasta, used leftover meat in sandwiches and pot pies, and swapped cheaper cuts such as chuck for sirloin or ribeye. It describes meatloaf among the dishes that remained popular despite humble origins.
Wars kept the loaf in demand. Food Republic says wartime meat shortages made meatloaf popular again, and Grub Americana says World War II rationing kept it going, with recipes appearing on soup, ketchup and cereal labels. By the war’s end, the site says, entire cookbooks were devoted to the dish.
The 1950s Peak and Today
Food Republic says meatloaf peaked in the 1950s, when the 1958 cookbook 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger included 70 meatloaf recipes. The article adds that modern versions use beef, veal, pork, turkey, chicken or vegan mixes, with vegetables, cheese and sauces, and that variations include muffin-tin portions and tomato glazes.
Wikipedia notes that today’s additions aim more for lower-fat dishes with better binding and consistency. Through every change, the formula from the 1870s remains the template: ground meat, a starch, an egg and a seasoning, shaped into a loaf and baked.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Roundhere44 – CC0/Wikimedia Commons
