Recipe for Hemingway’s Hamburger
When on May 6 2013, the day that marked 60 years of Pulitzer Prize for The Old Man and the Sea, 2,000 digitized documents from Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban home were donated to John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Dorchester, USA, there were things like hotel bills, a letter to his fourth wife from a former lover and the writer’s letter to Ingrid Bergman. There were also “more mundane” papers like his detailed instructions to his household staff on the preparation of hamburgers: “ground beef, onions, garlic, India relish, and capers, cooked so the edges were crispy but the center red and juicy.”
When the mundane detail reached food writer Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, she decided to find out the recipe and recreate what she calls Hemingway’s Hamburger. Her experience in making it has been discussed by the writer in a Paris Review blogpost. Here’s the recipe of Wild West Hamburger (it was previously published in a 1966 book called Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cookery by Mary Hemingway, the writer’s spouse, his fourth wife).
FROM EXPERIMENTING:
PAPA’S FAVORITE HAMBURGER. There is no reason why a fried hamburger has to turn out gray, greasy, paper-thin and tasteless. You can add all sorts of goodies and flavors to the ground beef — minced mushrooms, cocktail sauce, minced garlic and onion, chopped almonds, a big dollop of piccadilli, or whatever your eye lights on. Papa prefers this combination.
Ingredients:
1 lb. ground lean beef
2 cloves, minced garlic
2 little green onions, finely chopped
1 heaping teaspoon, India relish
2 tablespoons, capers
1 heaping teaspoon, Spice Islands sage
Spice Islands Beau Monde Seasoning — ½ teaspoon
Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder — ½ teaspoon
1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork
About one third cup dry red or white wine.
1 tablespoon cooking oil
What to do:
Break up the meat with a fork and scatter the garlic, onion and dry seasonings over it, then mix them into the meat with a fork or your fingers. Let the bowl of meat sit out of the icebox for ten or fifteen minutes while you set the table and make the salad. Add the relish, capers, everything else including wine and let the meat sit, quietly marinating, for another ten minutes if possible. Now make four fat, juicy patties with your hands. The patties should be an inch thick, and soft in texture but not runny. Have the oil in your frying-pan hot but not smoking when you drop in the patties and then turn the heat down and fry the burgers about four minutes. Take the pan off the burner and turn the heat high again. Flip the burgers over, put the pan back on the hot fire, then after one minute, turn the heat down again and cook another three minutes. Both sides of the burgers should be crispy brown and the middle pink and juicy.
But since Mei Yen Powder is no longer available in the market, Tan suggests an easy way of making it on your own:
9 parts salt
9 parts sugar
2 parts MSG
If a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon Mei Yen Powder, use 2/3 tsp of the dry recipe (above) mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.