The story of Yvonne’s meatloaf

Guest author: Cynthia MacGregor
Website: Cynthia MacGregor

The Story of Yvonne’s Meatloaf

My mom’s meatloaf was spectacular and a family fave. I used to urge her to serve it to company, and when she protested that meatloaf wasn’t a company dish, I couldn’t understand it. Why not? There was surely nothing better than my mom’s meatloaf! My childhood best friend, Donald, begged to be invited over when it was meatloaf night…or if he was invited over in advance for a particular evening, he begged my mother to make meatloaf that night.

Later, as an adult, as I became a bit more proficient as a cook, I copied my mother’s recipe (this was quite a lot of years ago) and attempted to make her meatloaf myself. It was a dismal failure. Though I followed the directions explicitly, the results bore little resemblance to my mother’s meatloaf. I think I tried a second time before throwing out the recipe in despair and telling my mother, “Well, you’ll always know what you can do when you want to give me a treat: Make me a meatloaf. No one can make them like you can.” And for many years thereafter, my mother would treat me from time to time either by having me over for a meatloaf dinner or by making TWO meatloaves when she planned a meatloaf dinner for herself and my stepdad…and giving the second meatloaf to me.

When my mom died (five years ago), I not only mourned her terribly but mourned the prospect of no more meatloaf. Very shortly after her death, I went to her condo and raided her kitchen, intent on claiming her trove of recipes for myself. My stepdad, no cook, surely wouldn’t want her recipe file. But I was too late. Not only didn’t he want them, he had already thrown them all out! Gone was her treasured file of recipes…including the famed meatloaf recipe. I despaired.

So did my daughter. She, too, wanted to get her hands on “Grandma’s” recipe file…and most especially that meatloaf recipe. In Laurel’s growing-up years, a visit to Grandma (my mother) always included a meatloaf, as Laurel loved my mom’s meatloaf just as did everyone else who ate it. And even after Laurel was grown, though she had not got her hands on the recipe
nor tried to cook Yvonne’s meatloaf, she relished her visits to her grandparents not only for the pleasure of being with them but because inevitably my mom would make a meatloaf.

Totally unwilling to resign myself to never having my mother’s meatloaf again, I determined to recreate the recipe. I had had it once. And I had sat in the kitchen with my mother quite a few times while she made the meatloaf, even though I hadn’t been consciously studying what she did. Let me see…I think she used a pound of meat…and I remember that she used chuck…at one point, in the name of being health-conscious, she had switched to round but
complained to me that the flavor wasn’t the same and that she was going back to using chuck…and I knew there was tomato juice–not tomato sauce nor ketchup either, but tomato juice…and herbs were VERY important…and garlic, which I recalled she put through a garlic crusher…and fresh white bread, torn up by hand into crumbs…. Bit by bit I reconstructed the recipe in my head, wrote down trial amounts, assembled the ingredients, used what seemed the right amounts and adjusted what I’d written down, decided on three herbs that I thought would be best…formed the loaf, remembering that it was not to be packed tightly together, and put it in the oven while figuratively holding my breath.

My mother’s spirit must have been guiding my hand. The meatloaf came out perfect, an absolute duplicate of Yvonne’s meatloaf on her best days (she too had had occasions when the meatloaf didn’t come out quite as good as it might have) – and I exultantly reported to my daughter, “I’ve re-created Grandma’s meatloaf – I have the recipe!!” I copied it over for
Laurel, and now she and I both make my mother’s meatloaf – flawlessly – just like Yvonne used to. We may have lost her, but we still have her meatloaf – and the memories that go with it.