The 1960s Campbell's Loaf Recipe We're Glad Everyone Forgot

We're no strangers to kitchen hacks. They're a great way to add flavor, speed up the cooking process, or improve culinary outcomes. While some have faded into obscurity, other old-school kitchen hacks have definitely aged well. Using canned soup in a recipe is one of those tricks, where a can full of balanced flavor can become the backbone of a meal. But the recipe for tomato-ham loaf that we spotted in a 1961 edition of Better Homes and Gardens is one we're glad didn't make it into that tin of secret family recipes.

The recipe calls for combining half a cup of Campbell's tomato soup with a pound of ground ham, half a pound of lean ground pork, and other meatloaf fixings — bread crumbs, egg, onion, and seasonings including dry mustard — before baking it as a loaf. While the technique is sound, it's the flavor combination that has us questioning the cooks of the past.

First: Where does one even get ground ham? A search of Instacart with a Denver-area delivery address didn't come up with any results other than diced ham. The product seems to be regionally available — some meat producers in Indiana or Missouri, for example, have ground ham available in chubs — but it's far from ubiquitous. Secondly, the taste leaves a lot to be desired. We imagine this loaf would probably taste like, well, ham and ketchup. Plus, as the recipe specifies lean ham and lean pork, even the addition of all that soup may not be enough to make up for the lack of fat in the mixture, resulting in a pretty dry loaf. Not terrible, but not particularly enticing. We'll stick to a nostalgic ham sandwich instead.

With all that being said, there are ways to use canned soup with more success. They're great to have on-hand to help simplify your recipes — think tomato soup in chili or cream of chicken soup as the base for chicken pot pie, no roux required. Canned soups can even find a home in meatloaf, too.

A meatloaf can really only be called a success if it's both flavorful and moist, and a can of soup can help make that happen. A binder — often made of milk, eggs, and breadcrumbs — helps hold the meat together as well as keep moisture inside the meatloaf. Need your meatloaf recipe to be dairy-free? Canned soup adds flavor and moisture to dairy-free meatloaf in a way that plain water or stock never could by combining the richness of broth with additional veggies and seasonings. Plus, since all that flavor is already in the can, you can get from your mise en place to the final product even faster.