Taste of History is a limited-run blog series exploring some of the old-school recipes found in archival collections. Each blog post will feature a different recipe found in the vault, recreated by staff at the archives with modern ingredients and tools. As spring is now in the air, today we are sharing something seasonal with you!
This month we tried “Planked Hamburger with Bananas” from Seasonable Meat Recipes, published in 1929 as a guide to healthy eating. According to this guide “the right diet is the most important single factor in promoting health,” and each season brings different dietary requirements. In spring, their main concern is that the body will be low on essential minerals after limited access to fresh fruit and vegetables during the winter. This is apparently worsened because people often have low appetites in spring, so having “highly palatable” options are essential to tempt people into eating.
This book was published by the “National Live Stock and Meat Board,” a lobby group formed in 1922 to represent the interests of cattle, sheep and pig raisers in the United States. They mostly worked through consumer marketing to promote the benefits of eating meat, including cook books like this one.
The first challenge from this recipe, however, was the ingredient list. It calls for “1 cup cooked breakfast food,” but there are many different types of breakfast foods that are cooked. After some research, and a spirited office debate, we decided this must mean oatmeal which can be used as an ingredient in meatloaf. For the cracker crumbs, I used crushed saltines. Finally, I chose to use stock rather than milk for the liquid in this recipe, because I thought it would add some more flavor to the dish.
Once I had mixed all of the ingredients I shaped them into a large flat cake in a 9×13 inch pan, trying to keep it relatively thin, and dotted the top with butter. Then I faced the second challenge of this recipe, which is the cooking method. The instructions say to broil the dish for approximately 20 minutes. Despite trying to rotate the dish, the top burnt very quickly while the inside remained entirely raw. After the initial 20 minutes, and one triggering of my fire alarm, I tried to bake it in the oven to cook the meat through without charring the top even more. After nearly two hours the meat was no longer pink, but it was so mushy that I still wasn’t confident it was properly cooked. The texture was like eating raw meat.
I was only slightly more successful with the broiled bananas. After covering the outside with melted butter and lemon juice, I put the bananas under the broiler for four minutes. Once again that the top was burnt, but the interior of the banana was raw. My best theory for what went wrong is that the broiler in the electric oven may have too high of heat. This would burn the top, while not permeating through to the interior. Another possibility is that we were wrong about the breakfast food required and were meant to add bacon and eggs. Whatever the reason, my attempt at planked hamburger with bananas was a complete disaster. And I don’t think that their suggestion to make a more “elaborate looking dish” by alternating the bananas with baked stuffed tomatoes would have helped either.
