Burger-Onion Shortcake: or, A delicious greasy time capsule

Let's go back to the days when beef was cheap.

'Burger-Onion Shortcake 1 pound lean ground beef* 1 can (1¼ cup) condensed onion soup (undiluted) Seasonings to taste 1 or 2 tbsp mustard 2 sandwich-sized slices of cheese 1 tbsp flour (optional) Heat oven to 350°. Grease an ovenproof skillet. Mix beef with seasonings and a quarter-cup of onion soup. Shape half the meat into a patty. Place in the pan. Spread a very thin layer of mustard on it. (It's easier to fingerpaint the mustard on than to use a spatula or knife.) Lay a slice of cheese on top. Then spread with a half cup of soup. Make a patty out of the remaining meat, and lay it on top of the first one. Repeat the layers: Spread the meat with mustard, top with cheese, then spread the remaining soup on top. Bake for 45 minutes. Upon removing it from the oven, cover the pan with foil and allow to rest for 10 minutes. For onion gravy, remove the meat and then warm the drippings over medium heat. Spoon this on top of servings. If desired, thicken the gravy with flour. *You want the leanest beef you can get. There's no point in the recipe where you drain off the fat. Note: Even though stacking the meat like a shortcake is the whole gimmick of the recipe, we do not recommend it. The top layer will slide off anyway. We recommend either making one big patty, or baking the two of them side-by-side. Source: Mid-Century Menu

This comes to us from Mid-Century Menu, and is more of a time capsule today than it was before anyone outside of medical science had ever heard the word "coronavirus." In those ever-farther-away times, ground beef was (if not exactly cheap) priced more like a weekend treat than a premeditated splurge. Sometimes I can't believe that I once did hamburgers like this.

Amusing before the pandemic, a heart-stopping extravagance today.

Unless prices drastically change in the grocery store, people in the future will be astonished that ordinary people used to spontaneously buy large quantities of ground beef. The idea of casually grilling hamburgers in the park will be as mythical as the days when servants in New England would threaten to quit if their cheapskate employers served lobster more than twice a week.

Anyway, let's look at the recipe. It's called a "burger-onion shortcake." We have previously discussed how America can turn any food into a dessert- such as transforming a traditional Italian pasta dish into "chocolate lasagna." It looks like we have found the rare reverse of that process today.

Here is the surprisingly sparse allotment of ingredients. The canned onion soup was tricky to find. It seems very few people buy any, because it was hidden in the corner of the lowest shelf. I needed a few minutes to spot it. What's worse, there was no store-brand onion soup. I don't know what made me wince harder: purchasing name-brand canned soup, or buying extra-lean ground beef to dump the canned soup into.

I tried and failed to make myself feel better about paying name-brand prices for gelatinous glop. Upon cautiously dipping in a spoon, we found that canned onion soup is actually not too bad. It was very reminiscent of canned cream of celery soup, which I argue is far superior to cream of mushroom for gluing casseroles together.

I paid full price for this.

To repeat, I don't know which extravagance hit me harder, the name-brand soup or the log of extra-lean beef. Either way, this is one of the most expensive mixing bowls we've done in a long time.

As often happens with meatloaf, the mixing spoon was useless. You have to get in there with your hands. The canned soup turned our beef into sticky mess.

Reading ahead in the recipe, we see that after baking we are meant to thicken the pan drippings with flour. So, to economize on dishes, I chose to bake this lovely beefy shortcake in a pan that is equally at home in the oven and on the stovetop. 

As an incidental note, this skillet was part of a pair that I bought so I could give the bigger one away as a wedding present. I should have waited for the fifth anniversary to shop for gifts, because they didn't have one.

Well, having gotten our first sticky slab of beef into the pan, it was time to start making delicious layers of, um, cake! It begins with a big squirt of delicious mustard. Anyone with sense would say this is ridiculous. But for those trying this at home, you should know that it's easier to fingerpaint the mustard onto the shortcake than spoon-spread it. 

Also, this was too much mustard. Use less. You want to barely coat the top, not generously paint it.

And now we get to the only part of this recipe that bears a glancing resemblance to shortcake: putting dairy in the middle. But instead of whipped cream, it's cheese! I probably should have gotten cheddar for period-correctness, but pepper jack was in the fridge. 

Having briefly flirted with normality and cheese, we bring out this recipe's reason for existence: a big mound of name-brand cream-of-onion ooze. We don't have a source for this recipe, but I am willing to bet my beefcake that it was an advertisement for canned soup.

The canned soup was unexpectedly tricky to spread. It kept uprooting my carefully-placed cheese.

Well, that finishes the first layer. We carefully shaped a second beef patty to match the first, or at least tried to. It landed with a THWAP.

The recipe didn't say to put mustard on both beeves, but I did anyway because we already had the mustard measured out and I refuse to donate condiments to the city dump. (We squirted the mustard into a tiny bowl before beginning to avoid getting germy raw-meat hands all over the bottle. Having a dishwasher makes culinary hygiene a breeze.)

And here it is, ready to bake! You'd think we'd be directed to complete our beef shortcake with cheese on top, but the recipe says to crown this with canned soup.

Our kitchen smelled like fast food as the shortcake baked. Unless you noticed the dirty dishes in the sink, you'd have thought I went out for drive-thru instead of baking at the house. The hot cheese, the onions in synthetic soup, and the beef somehow united to smell like the the interior of a car when you've decided that you don't have it in you to cook dinner tonight.

After the baking time elapsed, we opened the oven to find that our beef shortcake had turned into a brown-black pustule floating in canned onion ooze. To my surprise, the soup on top had turned a decent golden brown. But that didn't make our shortcake look any better. 

You will also note that our two layers of meat slid off of each other as they baked.

Again, I bought name-brand soup and extra-lean beef for this.

You might think we are finished, but the recipe ends with "For onion gravy thicken drippings with two tablespoons flour." Before we could do that, I had to get the meat out of the pan. The burger-onion shortcake fell apart. I thought I would lift it out with a wide spatula, but ended up scooping out fragments of beef with a slotted spoon. 

I understand that for many people, their first attempts at grilling hamburgers end up falling apart while they helplessly try to keep the meat from falling through the rack onto the flames below. I did not expect a similar experience with meatloaf.

Moving back to what remained in the pan, this is the first time I have ever tried the old-fashioned practice of making gravy out of pan drippings. I didn't understand why I was supposed to thicken this at all because it looked just fine already. (Or at least, it looked as good as you can expect for canned soup with beef runoff.)

Because I prefer to make recipes as written so that I can blame the writers, I followed the instructions. Our gravy, made as directed, was a brown paste. If we must have gravy with our hamburger shortcake, I think you'd be better off just spooning the drippings out of the pan without modifying them with flour.

See those mounds of brownish ooze on either side of our serving of shortcake? That's supposed to be the gravy. I would have simply served it right out of the pan, but apparently it was too runny for the test kitchen full of professional home economists. Because I followed the recipe's directions, our gravy looks like unfortunate plops of slime.

Our burger-onion shortcake tasted near-exactly like a hamburger from a drive-thru. It seemed like it should have come out of a brown paper bag that had gone translucent with grease.  I think I overdid it with the mustard, but in my defense the recipe didn't give a measurement. I would make this again (if ground beef was like 50% off), but with less cheese and less mustard. Rather than completely covering the layers, one cheese slice on each is enough.

I did not feel compelled to save the gravy.