Photo by Christie Matherne Hall
A glimpse inside the author's grandmother's shoebox of old recipes, including one for her (in)famous meatloaf.
Between my father’s deer hunting, bass fishing, and cooking hobbies, I grew up eating really good.
We were a cooking family. I can count on two hands the number of times we went out for dinner before I turned fifteen. Mom cooked mostly on weekdays—eventually, I started helping: baked chicken, hamburger steaks, spaghetti with meat sauce, red beans and rice. Dad took over on weekends and when we had people over. On the most minor of special occasions, we ate homemade slow-braised beef roast, deer sausage gumbo, crawfish etouffée, bacon-wrapped deer backstrap roll-ups, fresh fried catfish, boiled peanuts, and classic brown jambalaya. Dad takes flavor seriously, often refining his seasonings and methods aloud at the dinner table, and always striving to make the next dish better than the last.
But of all the home recipes, there was one classic that never graced our table: meatloaf.
My dad hated meatloaf. It was more of a grudge—his mother apparently made a ketchuppy one so bad, and so often, that Dad banished all its variations from our household forever. Nobody made it on the maternal side of the family either, so I have exactly zero childhood memories involving meatloaf. I trusted my dad’s refined culinary opinion. In my young mind, meatloaf landed in the same pot as fruitcake—squarely in the “foods to groan at” category.
My dad hated meatloaf. It was more of a grudge—his mother apparently made a ketchuppy one so bad, and so often, that Dad banished all its variations from our household forever.
I finally ate my first bite in my early twenties, after working the Thursday lunch shift at Pinetta’s European Restaurant in Baton Rouge. If you were lucky enough to get a slice of the Thursday meatloaf at Pinetta’s before it closed in 2024, you’d know that it was the best on the planet, and you’d understand how it befuddled me. How could my culinary genius of a father banish this exquisite use of ground beef?
For several years after that first experience, I put myself through meatloaf college (I ordered meatloaf every time I saw it on a restaurant menu). I learned that not all meatloaf is as good as the Thursday special at Pinetta’s, but I didn’t encounter any loaves that made me want to damn the dish to hell. After experimenting with meatloaf at home, I concluded that it was fairly difficult to screw up such a thing, so I assumed my grandmother—who died when I was ten—must have been a not-so-great cook. Maybe that’s why Dad put so much effort into becoming a good cook, I thought. That would explain everything.
A Shoebox in Time
In 2019, I was home for the holidays, sipping wine and writing Christmas cards at my parents’ kitchen table, when my mom showed up with an old shoebox in her hands. It was my paternal grandmother’s recipe collection.
I’ve kept every sentimental scrap of paper anyone’s ever handed me, so not only did I accept the box, but I immediately dove into it, Christmas cards be damned. The first piece I saw was a recipe for buttermilk fried shark with lemon relish. I squinted at it, suspicious of its inclusion. I also thought that it sounded really good.
Mom and I inspected at least half of the box that evening, hoping to find a good Christmas pie recipe. The recipes were mostly handwritten in my grandmother’s tiny script, scrawled on the backsides of receipts; or typewritten on index cards. Many were clipped from magazines and newspapers. The subject matter went all over the place, with certain hallmarks of mid-century cookery and a clear tendency toward Louisiana seafood: congealed salads, mock strawberry preserves (using figs instead), shrimp casserole, oyster fritters. Eventually, a custard pie recipe rose to the top of the pile for our Christmas table.
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There were more than just recipes, though: a “Dear Polly” column about microwaving parsley to preserve it for the freezer and a remedy for soggy bottom pie crusts; a pamphlet of prayers from St. Dymphna Catholic Center, a hospital in Mandeville—its seven-digit telephone number at the bottom. There was an empty envelope with my grandmother’s name—Lurline Matherne—and her Baton Rouge address, postmarked January 21, 1992, right around the time she moved to a nursing home with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
And then, suddenly, there it was, neatly handwritten on a torn piece of an envelope: the meatloaf recipe.
Lurline
Lurline’s custard pie recipe was a dud. It did not set in time for Christmas (or any holiday), but neither did my fascination with her recipe box. For all I knew, the box was full of recipes that, like the custard pie, didn’t work. But I had so few lived memories with her; this box seemed to hold more than all of them combined. Touching the delicate scraps of paper with her tiny, neat cursive felt like touching the other side of a century. (Well, not quite a century, but close.)
My grandmother was born in St. James Parish in 1913, near the onset of the first World War. She came of age during the Great Depression and was raising children by the time Hitler invaded Poland. Lurline married my grandfather and gave birth to six children across twenty years—my dad was the last, the 1956 caboose, destined to become an uncle at five years old.
Like most Americans from that era, Lurline’s life and habits were shaped by scarcity. I was told she could stretch a cup of beans to feed fifteen people. Her recipe box held evidence of this talent. For example, she took a grocery list written on a torn strip of paper, turned it upside-down, and wrote a recipe from the bottom up, using every last centimeter of white space. There’s another grocery list on the back, meaning she made sure the labored slip of paper got through two separate grocery trips and ended up in that shoebox at the end of the week. I’ve never considered reusing a grocery list in my life.
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Whenever she copied recipes from other places, she took great care to note the origin on the index card, receipt, shred of envelope, etc. At least once, she sourced a recipe from a Winn-Dixie grocery bag—I know, because she credited it in writing.
Lurline was fond of the recipes that appeared in Baton Rouge’s long-running afternoon daily, The State-Times. I found at least twenty recipes clipped from those pages, many of them cakes and desserts. Enough of those had dates that I was able to conclude she was clipping State-Times recipes up until the paper merged with The Advocate in 1991.
The shoebox holds hundreds of recipes in total. If my grandmother wasn’t a great cook, as I had long assumed, she was at least a relentless one. I began to wonder if my assumption had been wrong. What bad cook would press on so long at something she’s no good at, right until the very end? And what bad cook—what cook at all, really—would bother to cite a source when the source is a grocery bag?
Well, me. I would probably do that. Clearly, I had a meatloaf to make.
Photo by Christie Matherne Hall
An exercise in ancestral recipe-following: meatloaf edition.
Meatloaves and Fishes
Meatloaf isn’t a monolith; it’s an entire universe unto itself, with endless iterations. You can cut it with pork, wrap it in bacon, or top it with an all-day Bolognese sauce. Add shredded cheddar or chopped trinity for some texture, or give it some smoky flavor on a grill.
Lurline didn’t do any of that. Her meatloaf recipe has six ingredients: ground beef, eggs, onion soup mix, ketchup, water, and flavored breadcrumbs. As I looked over the recipe before making my grocery list, I noticed there was no amount listed for the breadcrumbs—“as much as needed,” she writes—and based on the instructions, the ketchup is not on top. It’s mixed into the meatloaf.
Finally, the night before I talked to Dad about all this, I crafted the ancestral meatloaf with enough breadcrumbs to stretch the beef a bit, still hopeful that it wouldn’t be bad enough to strike meatloaf entirely from the mouths of one’s children. (I did make an auxiliary loaf with half of the beef, you know, just in case Lurline’s really was inedible.)
My honest review: On the meatloaf scale, I’d grade this recipe well-below-average. I think the ketchup might be responsible for the tender texture, but the dish is sweetened by the taste of plasticized, cooked ketchup—not an ideal flavor for a meatloaf, nor an ideal smell for a kitchen. Said ketchup, plus the onion soup mix and the breadcrumbs (I used Italian), are the only seasonings in the recipe. In my notebook, I wrote, “So this is what food in the sixties tasted like.” With its “as much as needed” amount of breadcrumbs, Lurline’s meatloaf definitely has the spirit of a Great Depression recipe. “Yeah,” Dad added, “and it was greatly depressing to eat that stuff.”
The shoebox holds hundreds of recipes in total. If my grandmother wasn’t a great cook, as I had long assumed, she was at least a relentless one. I began to wonder if my assumption had been wrong. What bad cook would press on so long at something she’s no good at, right until the very end?
Over a long phone call, Dad told me stories of his mom’s scarcity mindset in the kitchen. She thought it was nuts to use the correct amount of oil for deep-frying, so her fried fish never turned out crispy. When one of Dad’s older brothers would unexpectedly show up to the house with his family for dinner (which he says happened often), Lurline would augment a would-be tasty dinner with whatever was available to adequately feed everyone. “Mom really was a great cook,” my dad admitted. “It’s when she started stretching everything to feed more people that it could get unappetizing.”
The ketchup, though, was apparently added with love. “Kids like ketchup,” Dad remembers her saying, “so I put some in, so that maybe you’d like my meatloaf.” And the kicker—apparently Lurline’s tagline: “I made it just for you!” Teenage Dad would grumble back: “If you make it just for me, make something I like.”
As a result, Dad’s approach to cooking in adulthood focuses on flavor, combined with tried-and-true preparation methods. Cost is considered, but it does not have veto power. When Dad moved out on his own, he took up hunting and fishing, and fried his own catches with lots of oil. His mom loved it, but I imagine it was easier for her to visit my dad on fish fry-night than to pour five cups of oil in a pan for a single meal.
My grandmother’s recipe box is something of a gamble, but along with the busts, there’s a decent chance of landing on something incredible. My mom told me that her brother raved about Lurline’s shrimp casserole for years, and her crawfish bisque recipe was the stuff of legends. On the phone with Dad, when I rattled off some of the odder inclusions in the shoebox, such as the figgy recipe for mock strawberry preserves, he interrupted me mid-sentence: “That shit is delicious.”
For what it’s worth, my dad resolved his grudge against the meatloaf universe about ten years ago after he enjoyed a friend’s, and now he makes his own version at home. In fact, he made a meatloaf a few days after we talked about it.
My husband liked Lurline’s meatloaf better than my slightly jazzed-up version, and I’m still a little sore from that burn. Maybe one mark of a good cook is the ability to admit when your meatloaf just isn’t that great.
