A few years back the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston digitized 2,500 assorted papers from their Hemingway Collection. Among them was a personal recipe from Papa Hemingway himself. A recipe for his favorite pan fried hamburgers.
What better salute to Proud Papas everywhere on Father’s Day than hamburgers made from Papa’s personal recipe.
The recipe was typed by Hemingway and contains handwritten notes in the margin.
Hemingway was famous for a terse minimalist style of writing that dispensed with flowery adjectives and got straight to the point. He was once challenge to write the shortest story he could, he wrote it in six words “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
He was a little more long winded in his hamburger recipe.
“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, ground almonds, a big dollop of Piccalilli, or whatever your eye lights on…”
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 — 1/2 teaspoon
Spice Islands Mei Yen Powder — 1/2 teaspoon
1 egg, beaten in a cup with a fork
About 1/3 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 your 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.
*Spice Islands stopped making Mei Yen Powder several years ago, according to noted food writer, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan. You can recreate it, she says, by mixing nine parts salt, nine parts sugar and two parts MSG. “If a recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of Mei Yen Powder,” she writes, “use 2/3 tsp of the dry recipe (above) mixed with 1/8 tsp of soy sauce.”
Make some burgers for Dad and don’t forget the beer. Hemingway was fond of Ballantine Ale, an American Blonde Ale, reminiscent of the German style Kölsch. But you and Dad can drink whatever you like or you can drink to his memory, if he has joined Papa Hemingway in the hereafter.
Photo: Ernest Hemingway Collection, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.