The Old-School 'Luxury' Deli Meat Few People Remember Today

In the annals of packaged deli meats there have been quite a few varieties that were once exceptionally popular, but now have nearly been lost to time. If you were a kid growing up in the 1970s or early '80s, you may recall a few like olive loaf, a bologna-like meat studded with olives, or luxury loaf, another bologna-adjacent product. Luxury loaf may sound fancy, but it was just one of many ubiquitous lunch meats of a bygone era that might be found in a school lunch sandwich or in some unusual '70s dish like meat pops (chilled lunch meat and cheese wrapped around a pretzel stick).

While Oscar Mayer's version is probably the best remembered, if it's remembered at all, the company didn't invent it. This lunch meat, typically made from a finely minced blend of pork and beef that's shaped into a loaf and then cooked, originated in Bavaria in the 18th century, where it's called leberkase and is still very popular. In our research, we found a variety of brands in the U.S., like Honey, Briggs, and Mickelberry's, selling an Americanized version under the name luxury loaf as far back as the 1920s. How leberkase ended up as luxury loaf is a bit of a mystery.

While we didn't discover where the luxury part of the name originated, the 1930s version from Briggs was made with veal and pork and studded with pimentos and pistachios. Sounds pretty fancy, and sort of a mashup between pimento loaf and Italian mortadella, which is also bologna-like in texture, but spiked with cubes of fat and sometimes with pistachios.

Oscar Mayer didn't get into the luxury loaf game until the 1960s. Back in the 1940s, the brand did have a deli meat billed as "luxury ham loaf," but it is unclear if this was luxury loaf or just upscale ham. By the mid 1960s, the company was offering its version of luxury loaf along with a growing number of other deli meats like honey loaf, Bar-B-Q loaf, and old fashioned loaf. In 1980, Oscar Mayer even came out with a 90% fat free version, likely in the hopes of keeping consumers who were beginning to steer clear of fat in foods.

We couldn't find the exact date Oscar Mayer discontinued luxury loaf, but the brand had stopped advertising the product by the mid 1980s (the last ad for its luxury loaf we found was from 1984). Like another sausage of German origin, braunschweiger, luxury loaf had its heyday in the past century, but it's still around. New York City's Schaller & Weber offer a version that ties it back to its Bavarian roots, Leberkase Luxury Loaf.