Craving Salisbury steaks in gravy
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- April 30, 2020
- 1070
It seemed like a pretty good low-level joke: find a couple of those old-school TV dinners to bring home. It’s the kind of improvised thing you do when you’re not able to get out and do much else.
I wanted the kind in the divided aluminum tray with the meat in the front center, some kind of carefully cut mushy vegetable, mashed potatoes tasting of aluminum and a tiny brownie. I don’t know if such a thing is still made, but I couldn’t find any.
Still, standing in front of the glass cases of frozen food, something caught my eye: a box of Banquet “Salisbury steak” in gravy, which made for instant flashbacks.
My parents both had full-time jobs at Timken in New Philadelphia, so there wasn’t a lot of time or energy for cooking elaborate meals when they got home. Mom also was of the generation that saw all kinds of prepackaged, easily prepared foods hit the shelves, and they must have seemed like a lifesaver.
She talked about the things her grandmother made from scratch reverently because no one really did that kind of thing anymore, at least not working mothers. I wonder if she would have bothered to cook at all if it weren’t for me, a growing boy in the house.
The answer is yes, of course she would. Because that’s what she did. Today we might have “forage nights” where we don’t feel like eating anything in particular and just graze on whatever is in the kitchen. But I can’t imagine that happening then.
We had quite a few of those Salisbury steaks in gravy meals and sliced turkey and Swiss steak ones too, if I remember right. All you had to do was heat them up for an hour or so in the oven. Add mashed potatoes from flakes in a box, some instant stuffing, frozen vegetables or canned green beans, and you were set.
Sometimes there was a “no bake” cheesecake for dessert, which was pretty much cream cheese with a can of cherry-pie filling spilled out on top. None of this is by way of criticism.
Mom worked hard, kept a spotless house, did the laundry and all of it. Working families ate quickly prepared dinners, using whatever premade entrees facilitated food on the table with enough time left after washing dishes to catch “Happy Days” on TV.
Standing there in front of that box of Salisbury steaks in gravy, I suddenly wanted that for dinner in the worst way. I grabbed one of the last in the case and went on the hunt for more.
I missed Mom and those evenings, which are now wrapped in rosy haze in my memory. I wanted the smell of that stuff baking in the oven. I wanted to smell our old home. I found a box of instant stuffing, some Shake & Bake and a bag of frozen peas.
No, I didn’t get boxed instant mashed potatoes. There is a line to be drawn somewhere, and that’s the place to draw it.
Back home my wife instantly understood. She remembered those Salisbury steaks in gravy well and even had a childhood name for them: Sandy Patties.
We made the Salisbury steaks in gravy, the stuffing and some actual mashed potatoes for dinner that night. The house did smell like Mom’s kitchen, and it tasted as we remembered, which is to say it tasted like something that was once in a chemical vat and was now Salisbury steak in gravy on my plate. We gobbled it all up, and the whole adventure was a mistake in the end.
We normally try to eat fresh fruits and vegetables. We make everything we possibly can from scratch and are aware of what we’re putting in our bodies, not in an aging hippie with conjuring crystals on the end table sort of way, but because manufactured, processed food isn’t good for you and may account for a lot of the weird food-related ailments in the population today. I was amazed that to make the stuffing, all I had to do was wet it with hot water.
Our bodies weren’t prepared for an onslaught of pressed into submission quasi-meats and oil change gravy, and we had tummy aches and felt like slugs for a couple of days.
I somehow made it to adulthood, but man, that stuff is not good for you.