The Galveston County Daily News

The third season of “Mad Men” is under way on the American Movie Channel, and while the pitch-perfect period details have many viewers swooning over the early-1960s clothes and space-age Cadillacs, some of us are particularly riveted by the kitchen scenes.

Not all the kitchen scenes provoke envy from modern viewers. A recent episode in which Betty Draper spent a morning defrosting her freezer, using bowls of boiling water, an ice scraper and a stack of towels, made older fans wince at the memory of that chore, and left younger devotees of the show, those who grew up in the frost-free era, baffled.

Dinnertime on “Mad Men” brings back much happier memories. Meat loaf, while technically not one of the stars of the show, has made several appearances on the family dinner table. In real life, just as on television, meat loaf should win an award for a Best Supporting Role.

It’s easy to make, adapts well to ingredients on hand and can be made in advance for busy days.

Meat loaf is not completely without controversy: There’s a faction of meat loaf lovers who insist it’s not a meat loaf without a ketchup topping, and an equally adamant group claiming meat loaf and brown gravy are the true pairing.

This may be one of those rare arguments in which both sides are right; cookbooks from the late 1800s, the earliest to provide recipes for meat loaf, are almost evenly divided between recipes with a tomato topping and a brown-gravy version.

All meat loaves require a binding substance that is usually some sort of grain or grain product. Oatmeal is a frequent binder (perhaps because Quaker Oats printed a meat loaf recipe on its cylindrical box for decades) though breadcrumbs, cracker crumbs and cooked rice also are used.

Although the idea of an all-meat loaf with no filler sounds appealing and wholesome, in truth meat alone will not stick together. One advantage of using oatmeal as a binder is that it does not soak up any grease from the meat but holds the meat and any added vegetables together.

Grease can be a problem with cooking meat loaf. Molding a free-form loaf and cooking it in a baking dish allows the fat to drain off. Some cooks prefer to shape their loaf by cooking it in a loaf pan. But the grease then has no place to go, and the meat loaf essentially simmers in grease.

The best solution to having a perfect loaf without a lot of grease is to use a disposable foil loaf pan and poke holes along the bottom and the sides, allowing the grease to escape the pan during the cooking process.

When doing this, be sure to put the loaf pan with holes inside a baking dish, not directly in the oven rack. Otherwise, there will be an oven cleanup more dramatic than even the freezer-defrosting episode of “Mad Men.”

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Meatloaf With Italian Sausage

1 1/4 pounds ground beef 4 (4 ounce) links Italian sausage, casings removed 1 egg, beaten 1 small green bell pepper, chopped 1 onion, chopped 1/2 cup dry hot wheat cereal or oatmeal 1/2 cup milk 1 dash Worcestershire sauce Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Chop sausage finely. In a large bowl combine beef, sausage, egg beat, bell pepper, onion, cereal, milk, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. Mix together and press into a loaf pan.

Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour, or until cooked through. Drain grease from loaf pan periodically during baking. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.

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Mini Meat Loaves

1 egg 3/4 cup milk 1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese 1/2 cup quick cooking oats 1 teaspoon salt 1 pound ground beef 2/3 cup ketchup 1/4 cup packed brown sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons prepared mustard

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine the egg, milk, cheese, oats and salt. Add the ground beef, mixing well, and form this mixture into eight miniature meat loaves. Place these in a lightly greased 9x13 inch baking dish.

In a separate small bowl, combine the ketchup, brown sugar and mustard. Stir thoroughly and spread over each meatloaf.

Bake uncovered for 45 minutes.