Salisbury snake

a reptilian take on an old classic

Hiya, clowns!

The concept of comfort food can take on many forms, from recreating your grandma’s old recipes to reminiscing about things you ate at holiday functions as a kid. It can also come in the form of a favorite nostalgic food product. One comfort food I’ve noticed people tend to speak fondly about is frozen microwaveable dinners, which are something I generally did not eat growing up. This is because my parents were immigrants, and we mostly ate my mom’s really good Korean cooking (and took the occasional cherished trip to Old Country Buffet, RIP).

When I think about microwaveable dinners, the first kind that comes to mind is a Salisbury steak meal. But the thing is, I had not eaten one of these dinners in forever. I stopped eating these kinds of meals in my early 20’s, when I realized that every single Lean Cuisine I tried tasted exactly the same.

So I went to the grocery store and decided to taste test one after multiple decades. Were these things as good as everyone claimed? Why does everyone like them? And as the greatest food writer in all of history, what could I do to make a frozen Salisbury steak dinner better?

I went with a classic brand, Banquet, and when I got back home from the grocery store, I studied the box carefully.

It advertised an attractive-looking beef patty with grill marks on top of mashed potatoes with gravy, whole kernels of corn, and apples in some kind of cinnamon sauce. For some reason, the front and the back of the packaging was extremely proud of the fact that the mashed potatoes inside featured “real cream,” which was a detail I found curious.

It mentioned the cream twice on the front and twice on the back, and there was even a picture of cream on the back of the package too. Banquet appears to be obsessed with cream. I prepared the meal as instructed in the microwave, which took nearly 10 minutes including the suggested resting time.

This shit looked nothing like the front of the package.

In fact, it seemed like it could have been another meal entirely. I had a hard time telling if there were two types of gravy in the compartment with the Salisbury steak or if it had just separated somehow, and the grill marks on the meat were extremely thin. They appeared to have simply been drawn on the patty from some kind of eyebrow pencil or something.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this frozen dinner is worse than most of the things I have ever made for this newsletter, and I’ve done things like put raw oysters into Crunchwraps before.

The real issue here was this meat. That’s because I’ve never experienced a meat product with zero flavor to it whatsoever. It was like unseasoned baby food that barely held itself together, yet the package still had 1,030 milligrams of sodium in it.

Now perplexed, I looked up the ingredients to the meal and zoomed in on the steak portion.

SALISBURY STEAK PATTY: Mechanically Separated Chicken, Water, Pork, Beef, Breader (Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour [Bleached Wheat Flour, Niacin, Reduced Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Riboflavin, Folic Acid], Durum Flour, Leavening [Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate], Yeast), Textured Vegetable Protein (Soy Flour, Caramel Color), Soy Protein Concentrate, Less Than 2% Of: Dried Onion, Salt, Flavorings, Caramel Color, Potassium Phosphates, Dextrose, Potassium Salt, Soy Lecithin, Citric Acid

The leading ingredient in the Salisbury steak is fucking chicken. Then water. Holy shit. Pork and beef are sort of an afterthought. So this stuff tasted like water because it was made with actual water.

Oh well, at least the mashed potatoes have real cream in them.

MASHED POTATOES: Rehydrated Potato Flakes and Granules (Water, Potatoes, Mono- and Diglycerides, Citric Acid, Disodium Dihydrogen Pyrophosphate, BHT, Sodium Bisulfite), Water, Cream, Margarine (Soybean Oil, Water, Salt, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Monoglycerides, Sodium Benzoate, Soy Lecithin, Medium Chain Triglycerides, Vitamin A Palmitate, Beta Carotene [Color], Vitamin D3 [Cholecalciferol], Natural Flavor), Soybean Oil, Sugar, Salt, Nonfat Dry Milk, Monosodium Glutamate, Xanthan Gum, Guar Gum, Flavoring.

Good luck finding the cream in the ingredients list. It’s buried in there in third place, between the water and the…margarine? There’s real cream in it, but somehow butter would have been too much. Ah yes, and I love how the disodium dihydrogen pyrophosphate makes the potato granules shine, and don’t get me started on the medium chain triglycerides. They’re so much better than those horrible large ones.

The corn was pretty much just plain corn, but after having spent six whole minutes in the microwave, they’d become these somewhat chewy pellets. And the cinnamon apples were weirdly the best part, but that wasn’t saying much, since they were just small cubes of scaldingly hot fruit in a gloppy liquid.

Improving upon this would be easy enough. Since the Salisbury steak was the worst part about it, I could literally replace the meat with anything else and it’d be better. Even snake meat would be better.

Wait. Snake meat? Could I make this happen? Could I recreate this whole meal using snake meat as an ingredient?

Could I make…Salisbury snake?

Say what you will about the internet, but it can truly be a magical place when it comes to finding extremely specific shit.

After some serious nosing around, I managed to find a place here in Chicago that sells exotic meats, called Chicago Game and Gourmet. Man, this was right in our backyard! This includes snake, though at the time that I was hoping to buy it, they were temporarily out of python meat (it’s now back in stock for $50 a pound).

But they did have a sausage version. This was sausage with rabbit, pork, and python meat in it, and the fact that it was ground together just saved me some prep time anyway.

I bought all the things for the Salisbury steak, including the components for the side and the dessert, and began assembling everything together.

First, I removed all the exotic sausage from the casing so I had direct access to the coarsely ground meat.

I tried to determine which bits were from which animal. Something deep inside me told me that they would not have been friends if they’d all known each other during their lifetimes.

When it comes down to it, Salisbury steak is pretty much just meatloaf.

Most recipes call for beef (or a combination of ground beef and pork), eggs, and breadcrumbs as a binder, along with some seasonings. Since this sausage was already pre-seasoned, I didn’t feel the need to add anything extra. I really wanted to respect the ménage à trois, you know?

I manually mixed the ground sausage meat together with an egg and some panko, and everything came together with a delightful squelching sound.

You know exactly the sound I’m talking about.

Now, I have what may or may not be considered a controversial opinion.

You cannot beat the taste and texture of an artificially-made gravy. Sure, a homemade version can be nice and all, but I have never once been able to get the stuff I make to be glossy and perfect. Gimme that foodservice shit any day of the week.

Also, I really like that there’s a variety of gravy that’s just called “brown.” I’ve got some “brown gravy” for you, all right.

All you have to do with this stuff is whisk the powder with some cold water, heat it up for about five to 10 minutes, and you’ve now got the nectar of the gods.

A lot of homemade recipes for Salisbury steak call for nice things like mushrooms or onions to be added to the gravy, but because mushrooms do not exist in the frozen meal, I did not add any to my recreation. That might actually have added too much flavor, which Banquet considers bad.

Next, I hand-shaped the blended snaky meatloaf-like patties and cooked them off in a non-stick pan.

I couldn’t find an appropriate TV tray at the grocery store to buy, but I did find a stack of these interesting bear plates that had separate compartments built into them.

They would be perfect for a side of corn and dessert of sticky apples. You don’t want any of that shit touching. That’s illegal when it comes to frozen meals.

I laid down a bed of mashed microwaved potatoes and put one of the Salisbury snake patties on top, then I spooned the instant gravy on top of that.

Then I put some corn straight from the can right into one of the bear’s ears.

Eating that would be like picking nuggets of earwax out, which was an added bonus of interactivity.

Finally, for dessert, in a move that I thought was complete genius, I filled the bear’s other ear with canned apple pie filling, which is what the Banquet meal’s dessert reminded me of.

And just to add a touch of class, I sprinkled a tiny bit of dried parsley on top of the Salisbury snake.

See, this looked good. It also smelled good. I feel like this is sort of what people picture when they think about frozen Salisbury steak dinners (except for maybe the snake part). But in reality, Banquet actually seems to serve you disappointing chewable meat water.

The Salisbury snake was actually terrific.

And weirdly, it wasn’t necessarily because of the meat itself, though that helped, since it wasn’t immensely inflated with liquid. It turns out that the blend of rabbit, pork, and snake was actually quite mild, and if anything, it tasted kind of like coarsely ground veal. Even though jalapeños are listed in the sausage’s ingredients, they didn’t really come through as far as I could tell.

But you know what did? That magical brown gravy. It just tasted so nice and so brown, coating everything with its perfect manicured thickness. Sauces do not get any better than this. Hell, even the corn was better since it wasn’t microwaved to shit, and the pie filling was nice because it was extra-sweet and all fruit, and not suspended in a watery liquid.

What’s pretty funny here is my experiments usually end up the other way around. Whatever I make is what typically ends up being horrifying, and the products from the mysterious food factories are magical and delicious. But honestly, Banquet set the bar so low that I could have eaten a plate full of used aquarium gravel and I’d have been more satisfied. But for all you know, I could be exaggerating for effect, right?

Don’t worry. The people have spoken in terms of online reviews on Banquet’s website. And you know once you give people a chance to give reviews of your product, you’re immediately opening yourself up for an incredible line of attack.

Take this one-star review for example, titled “Nasty runny Salisbury steak dinner.”

It says:

I bought the Salisbury steak. Never again. The meat was swimming in some sort of beige colored liquid goo. There were no distinguishable mashed potatoes to stir. Just a piece of meat swimming in runny liquid. The apples were a joke. Exactly 3 tiny little pieces of apple in liquid goo and it was only half full. The cooking time seemed way off as well. The tray started melting when I followed the directions. Banquet needs to close the plant that makes those. Either that, or get some quality control in there.

The tray melted? Banquet needs to close the plant? Exquisite. No matter how much I practice the art of food writing, the truth is, online reviews will always be better than anything I could ever come up with. Another reviewer even said, “what boot licker changed the recipe but it tastes horrible now.”

But you know what? At least there’s some fucking cream in the mashed potatoes. That’ll do it. That’ll fix everything.

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Heh. I cooked with ground snake. That’s new territory, even for me. If you guys enjoyed today’s edition of Food is Stupid, don’t forget to hit that cute little heart button (supposedly that does something), and share the newsletter. Shares help this lil’ thing grow:

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Okay, time to clean up this mess in the kitchen, because there’s snake bits and corn kernels everywhere. As always, I love you all, and see you paid subscribers next week.