Hamburger Soup

When I was a lad in 4th grade, I took a substantial hit on my savings account at Union Bank in Pasadena to purchase a blender at Bullock’s for my mother as a Christmas present.  A year or two earlier, I had opened an account at Union Bank because they had built a huge office building and they had an adding machine in the lobby which intrigued me and convinced me they had excellent customer service.  With the blender came a cookbook published by Hamilton Beach,

and therein was the only recipe that my mother thought worthy: Hamburger Soup.

It was a hit, especially with some grated cheddar cheese sprinkled on top. I procured this 1965 1st edition, sixth printing, from ABE Book Exchange.

Oh, mom would throw in a package of frozen spinach reminding me that Popeye liked spinach.  (I hated any cooked vegetable, especially spinach which was gooey to swallow down with milk.  In our household, we had to eat everything on our plate that was served to us, so milk was an excellent way to facilitate transportation of undesirable matter.)

Addendum 3/7/26 3:05
I went to Costco to fetch some hamburger: ouch!  The 12% burger were in 5.5lb packages, I wanted about 7 pounds, so I bought 2 packages for 11 lbs and then worked backwards: 11 lbs of hamburger =~ 7 recipes.  Assuming parsimonious servings of 10 per recipe, that’s 70 servings.  I had not thought about how much freezer space we had.

I also thought it would be quicker to grill hamburgers on the BBQ rather than cook in a cast iron skillet.  I was wrong: you have to make the patties, then cook for about 15 minutes, and the grill could only accommodate a single package’s worth of patties, so that meant 2 grillings.  Then I had to hand crumble the burgers, so it may have cost me more time.  BUT, the flavor… the BBQ malliard effect on the burger meat makes the extra time it takes worth it, so i recommend BBQing the burgers.

And then if your arithmetic is limited, or your ability to make an eyeball count of peppercorns, then might consider not making 7 recipes worth at one time.  Here I poured some peppercorns into my hand and gallantly announced to my wife that it was my estimate there were about 35 peppercorns.  7 recipes calls for 70 peppercorns, so I poured another slightly lesser amount and tossed the two hands’ worth of peppercorns into the pot pell-mell.  We took a photo, and later seated at my desk, I started a count of this picture of the first handful, and lo, there are over 70.  So, this batch can be labeled spicy since it probably has double the amount of peppercorns.

My wife took a photo (below) of the 7 recipe worth:  https://mastodon.online/@mizblueprint/116190195091825412