Salisbury Steak: A Cure for the Winter Cold

As a kid, Salisbury steak to me was something to avoid in the school cafeteria’s lunch line, which wasn’t really hard to do.  I mostly brought my lunch from home anyway, except on pizza days because pizza was one of my favorite foods.  It still is, though my taste in toppings has grown up some, and my tolerance for grease has lessened.  The school cafeteria’s pizza was definitely greasy; the Salisbury steak was worse.  It had the look, texture, and I imagine, the taste of soggy cardboard soaked with grease, and it swam in gelatinous sea of coagulated brick-red gravy.  The smell was enough to make my stomach flip-flop.  My brother loved the stuff…but then again, he loved the cafeteria’s “fishwiches” too; sometimes there’s no accounting for taste.  

How could a meat-like substance bathed in greasy gravy be even remotely healthy?  Most likely it wasn’t.  The lunch-line’s version of the dish was a far cry from the original.  A 19^th century English and American physician, Dr. James H. Salisbury was one of the earliest proponents of the idea that diet is directly related to health.  He asserted our teeth were designed to chew meat; other foods such as vegetables and starches were actually poisonous to our bodies, and were possibly the cause of heart disease, tumors, mental illness, and tuberculosis.  Eating more lean meat was the prevention, and Salisbury steak, eaten 3 times a day and washed down with hot water, was the cure.   

From his book “The Relation of Alimentation and Disease”, written in 1888, his recipe for the meat dish named for him is as follows: 

“Eat the muscle pulp of lean beef made into cakes and broiled. This pulp should be as free as possible from connective or glue tissue, fat and cartilage…..The pulp should not be pressed too firmly together before broiling, or it will taste livery.  Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together. Make the cakes from half an inch to an inch thick.  Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke. When cooked, put it on a hot plate and season to taste with butter, pepper, salt; also use either Worcestershire or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice on the meat if desired.”

Muscle pulp, whether or not it’s free of glue tissue, sounds about as appetizing to me as the soggy cardboard the school served.  Sometime long after Dr. Salisbury died, and after elementary school cafeterias started serving healthier food; infinitely more appetizing than either the good doctor’s or the school’s versions, comes “Mom’s Salisbury Steak”.