MEAT COOK BOOK 1967: Cheese-Stuffed Hamburger Roll
After I first introduced MEAT COOK BOOK 1967, a lot of you expressed revulsion at the particular dish I chose to feature, which was basically a recipe for hot dogs on toast. To those of you, I say: Turn away now.
Are you still here? Great! Get a load of Cheese-Stuffed Hamburger Roll (p. 71).
Can you imagine the delight of the home meat-cook of 1967 as she thumbed through her prized book of recipes and discovered this? Cheese-Stuffed Hamburger Roll! It’s like a cheeseburger… in a roll! So familiar, yet so cosmopolitan. Her family would love it. She must have been beside herself with joy!
Just beside herself.
Aaanyway, don’t make this. It’s Velveeta meatloaf with chunks of wet bread and it tastes almost exactly like it looks, only saltier. To give yourself an idea of the flavor, you can start by imagining a cheeseburger that’s spent the morning on a steam table in a public school cafeteria, all sticky orange cheese and greasy, under-seasoned beef—but at school, it’s nobody’s job to drown your buns in hot onion-water. So Cheese-Stuffed Hamburger Roll is actually a lot worse.
Not to mention that even if everything you’ve seen and heard so far has your mouth watering (god, what?), it’s way too much work. It’s easily a 90-minute affair, and that’s assuming it takes you no time at all to interpret the one-word instruction, “Roll.” Then you have to watch as all your painstakingly-prepared toasted bread cubes end up sort of gagging this crusty, humiliated meatloaf, which comes out of the oven swimming in a dreadful, bubbling swamp of its own… you know what, it doesn’t matter. Just don’t make it. To help you not make it, here’s the recipe again. Commit it to memory in case it’s someday presented to you as some kind of “ground steak roulade.” (How cosmopolitan.)
Cheese-Stuffed Hamburger Roll
from Better Homes & Gardens MEAT COOK BOOK
- 1/4 cup chopped onion
- 3 cups toasted bread cubes
- 1 1/2 pounds ground beef
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1/4 teaspoon pepper
- 1/4 teaspoon sage
- 1 1/4 cups grated sharp process cheese
Simmer onion in 1/3 cup boiling water 5 minutes; pour over bread. Combine meat, egg, seasonings; pat out in 14×8-inch rectangle on waxed paper. Spread bread mixture over; sprinkle 1 cup of the cheese atop. Roll. Place in 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 x 2 1/2-inch loaf pan. Bake in moderate oven (350) 70 minutes. Sprinkle remaining cheese over; bake 2 minutes longer. Makes 4 to 6 servings.
