kelp

Pagoda Burger

Kelp, is this a doomed new Asian Fusion venture by the cult behind Panda Express? No, it’s just a…singular hamburger with a poorly executed concept.

How Did We Get Here?

Well! Back in March, the annual occurrence of Pi(e) Day reminded me of a decidedly retro recipe I had thought of making: Cheeseburger Pie. (Fun fact: linguists have slightly coopted Pi(e) Day to mean Proto-Indo-European Day, but I have zero interest in hanging out with people who are really into reconstructing that particular PIE. They tend to attract…you know. A non-inclusive sort.)

The next question, as always, is “so why didn’t you just make cheeseburger pie”. Well, I try to organize these posts around a cookbook I own, to, you know, show it off a little. And when I finally tracked down one with a cheeseburger pie recipe, it was…the same one I had recently used for the Hamburg Steak/Swedish Meat Loaf double feature.

If you, like me, are in a mild state of disbelief that I would have only one (1) vintage cookbook with a cheeseburger pie recipe, yeah. It’s weird. I actually did have one of those late 90’s supermarket periodical type deals from baking mix brand Bisquick lying around with an “Easy” or “No-Fuss” cheeseburger pie recipe. But not only are those booklets usually fairly uninteresting, this recipe was of the ‘dump’ variety, and also had barely anything in it. The type of ingredient list that prompts people to make fun of “white people food”, if you know what I mean.

But You Didn’t Make Cheeseburger Pie, Right?

Technically no…my mom, however, got bored one night and decided to slap together the easy recipe just for kicks. Predictably, it wasn’t good. Not only was it incredibly bland, even by my low standards, it just didn’t bake right. Turning it into a dump recipe instead of making a separate crust meant it became sort of a subpar quiche. There wasn’t any sense of cheese either, let alone cheeseburger. It was so bad we just dumped (badum tsh) that recipe booklet into the trash after.

However when I was trying to track down where I had seen the recipe, I ran across the Family Circle Hamburger Cookbook and thought “Aha!”. 

Surely!

But alas. Despite being in the right timeframe (Cheeseburger Pie Heyday, you might say), no dice. There is a lot of non-hamburger recipes, strangely, although they do still involve ground meat, so I guess close enough.

Introduction When is a hamburger not a hamburger? A good question and one you may ask yourself as you look through the mouth-watering recipes in this book. But the day when hamburger meant only beef has long past. Now hamburger or more correctly burger can mean ground meat-whether this is of beef, ham, pork, lamb, or even veal. This is what we have taken as our guide in this book. We have taken a further liberty in naming this book. Originally, hamburger meant a ground beef (not ham) patty in a bun. It was created especially for the St. Louis Exposition of 1904-making it a truly American tradition. But as ground meat and hamburger have come to mean the same thing to many people, we have taken this usage as our guide. And because there are so many uses for ground meat, we have not limited our recipes to those for hamburgers (ground meat in a bun). You'll find a chapter on meat loaves, another on hamburgers, and one on meatballs. In order to cover the many uses of this economical meat, there is a chapter covering other uses for this meat-called Hamburger Pot-pourri. But there is another great use for this book. Because of the increased concern about a too-fat diet, in each chapter there is a special section devoted to Low-Cal recipes. For easy reference, these are always at the back of the chapter. So whether you are looking for that extra-special meat loaf, an alternate to the regular hamburger, or a meatball recipe that you've never tried, you'll find it in your Hamburger Cookbook. Enjoy.

If you have to spend a whole-ass foreword justifying your cookbook scope…

And I got incredibly distracted by a different Asian fusion(???) recipe in the Ever-Popular Meat Loaves section

What a better way to celebrate the Chinese New Year than with Chinese Pork Roll, wrapped in a flaky pastry blanket

Getting envelopes with money in them? Nah man, it’s all about this Crescent Roll Pork Wellington…Roll…

I did some cursory polling of friends who might have encountered this were it actually a thing, and to no surprise they too were baffled. My curiosity was so piqued I even seriously considered making it, but upon closer examination, the lack of what I figured would be necessary ingredients for it to taste okay (we’re talking like, garlic, or ginger, or something) made me realize it was likely doomed in a similar fashion as the No-Fuss Cheeseburger Pie. 

It might seem odd that I continued to look for a suitable recipe in this cookbook, given again, this blog is no stranger to hamburger. But ground beef is one of the few reliable base ingredients in my refrigerator, and it’s easy to reduce portions. 

Beef – It’s Reasonably Often for Dinner

So It’s Just A Burger That’s Supposed to Look Like a Pagoda?

Yes, that’s a coffee cup stirrer instead of a tall toothpick

No, there’s a bit more to it. The ground beef mix has you add finely diced water chestnuts (pictured above) and soy sauce. A little too much soy sauce, honestly, but the crunch from the water chestnuts I think was successful. I can totally see other people not enjoying the difference in texture, though. 

There was also a ‘zippy’ sweet and sour sauce, that…I don’t know. I’m pretty good at tweaking sauces, and I felt, if anything, I spent a lot of effort making it ‘okay’. The main sweetener was molasses, which I felt was odd, with lemon juice for the sour. And again, no garlic, no ginger, no heat, just soy sauce (again) and sliced green onions. The final product didn’t taste bad, but it didn’t taste like anything I would bother making again. At the time, I thought to myself “why didn’t they just have you make like, a teriyaki sauce?” which I feel was a thing people knew about in the seventies, but…maybe not? And anyone going “well Kelp, that’s from a different culture’s cuisine” I mean yeah, but. This is the 1972 Family Circle Hamburger Cookbook. 

Anyways, that’s why I’m not bothering to reproduce the recipe here. I do think the idea of stacking increasingly smaller patties with toppings between them would be fun for kids, and it’s not really much extra work to portion them accordingly. And serving it on a bed of rice means you don’t gotta worry about hamburger buns. I would rebrand this as like, a ring-toss burger tower. With teriyaki sauce. (There’s a grilled pineapple slice at the bottom, nobody’s gonna ask questions.)

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