I do - and the last time will be the same
as the first: beef patty, rare, salt, pepper,
and maybe half a buttered bun. Rien de plus.
Just say "nay" to anything else.

Here is one of our favorites:
Title: Open Face Hamburgers
1 1/2 lb Beef,GROUND ROUND
8 Buns
1 lg Onion, spanish; sliced
pn Salt; to taste
pn Pepper; to taste

The simplicity is close to my heart. I of course
would use ground chuck if available - or better,
ground sirloin trimmings.

Do not butter buns. Split buns and toast buns under broiler - watch
carefully. Remove buns from oven when nicely toasted and let

For ground round I would prefer buttered (after
toasting of course).

cool. Thinly spread raw meat over entire top of bun Be sure to
cover edges of bun. Place under broiler. Watch carefully.
Cook to desired doneness.

Looks good, and I'd happily eat them, but
note that this method will leave some
underdone meat next to the bread, which may
cause anxiety to those who worry about
foodborne pathogens.

Top with raw onion slices.
Since this is using the oven, plan stove top extras. Good with potato
salad, pasta salad, etc.
== Courtesy of Dale & Gail Shipp, Columbia Md. ==

Nice one. The following would go better with the
previous recipe, but it's too long.

MMMMM----- Recipe via Meal-Master (tm) v8.01

Title: Sludge (MFK Fisher)
Categories: Information, Main dish
Yield: 1 essay

Information only

[Dave's note: This essay was written in 1942. Bear that in mind when
you read the prices stated.]

As soon as you have procured fifty cents, find some kind soul who
will let you use a stove, a food-grinder (any reasonable variation of
what is now called a "food mill" is useful, for pureeing cooked
vegetables and so on, unless that safe chewed texture is as
unpleasant to you as to me, and a big kettle. If you must pay for
the stove, it will probably cost about ten cents for the current or
gas. That cuts you down to forty cents.

You can either make a week's supply without meat, or about four days'
with meat. Say you choose to be Lucullan: then buy about fifteen
cents' worth of ground beef from a reputable butcher. (Be sure it is
beef and not what is none too euphoniously referred to as Hamburger.)
This much meat will have few nourishing qualities, but it will make a
good taste and its fat will stimulate you and help keep you warm.

Buy about ten cents' worth of ground whole-grain cereal. Almost any
large grocery carries it in bulk. It is brownish in color, coarsely
mealy in texture, and has a pleasant smell of nuts and starch.

Spend the rest of your money on vegetables. Buy them if you can at a
big market which most probably has a counter of slightly wilted or
withered things a day old maybe. Or otherwise buy the big coarse
ugly ones in any store. If you know the merchant and he likes you,
he will feel interested in your well-being and will help you
economize as if you were his own child, with mutual amusement.

Get one bunch of carrots, two onions, some celery, and either a small
head of cabbage or the coarse outer leaves from some heads that
should be trimmed a bit anyway. It does not matter if they be
slightly battered: you will wash them and grind them into an odorous
but unrecognizable sludge.

The other vegetables depend on how much money you have left and what
the season or your will may be. Squashes, like zucchini, are good
and of course tomatoes. Beans are fine. There can hardly be too
much celery if you like it. A clove of garlic is highly to be
recommended - IF you like it. Turnips are too strong, and beets of
course would make the whole thing into a ghoulish, ghastly and
completely horrendous mess of pink and cerise. Potatoes are useless;
the cereal takes care of any need for starch, and bulk as well.

Assemble what vegetables you have. Grind them all into the pot.
Break up the meat into the pot. Cover the thing with what seems too
much water. Bring to a boil, let simmer about an hour, and stir in
the ground grain-cereal. Mix thoroughly, and cook very slowly another
two hours, or longer if possible. Let cool and keep in a cold place
(the cellar if you have no icebox handy or borrowable.)

You can eat it cold and not suffer much, if your needs are purely
animal and unfinanced, but if you can heat what you want two or three
times a day it will probably taste much better. (A little of it
sliced and fried like scrapple is absolutely delicious, but of course
that takes it into the luxury class, what with the fat you'd need,
and the fire.)

It is obvious to even the most optimistic that this sludge, which
should be like stiff cold mush, and a rather unpleasant murky
brown-gray in color, is strictly for hunger. One way to make it
prettier, gastronomically, is to brown the meat in a handful of
flour, to a handsome walnut shade. Another is to use a douse of dear
old Kitchen Bouquet, toward the end but while you can still stir it
thoroughly into the aptly named Sludge. It is functional, really: a
streamlined answer to the pressing problem of how to exist the best
possible way for the least amount of money. I know, from some
experience, that it can be done on this formula, which holds enough
vitamins and minerals and so on and so forth to keep a professional
strong-man or a dancer or even a college professor in good health and
equable spirits.

MFK Fisher, from "How to Cook A Wolf", 1942
MM format by Dave Sacerdote

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