Salisbury Steaks

Weds. 30 May
No, your eyes are not deceiving you. Holt brought home some perfectly good but already cooked hamburgers from the Memorial Day picnic, and this was all we could think of to do with them.
This dish was named for Dr. James Henry Salisbury, a 19th-century American physician who believed that it was good for you to eat chopped beef three times a day. We could not find a single recipe in any of our regular cookbooks, not even the 1960s Betty Crocker; but luckily my old friend and American-food-fan Joan had done one for our grad-student-communal-household publication, the Frost Street Cookbook. She used Durkee brown gravy mix for hers, but Holt and I had to make do with fresh ingredients.
So brown a chopped onion in oil until it's transparent, and add about a half pound of sliced mushrooms. Fry them until they're dark and give off their liquid. Then add about a cup of meat broth: we used nine ice-cube-tray-cubes of our homemade veal stock, and when they melted, we nestled the hamburgers among them, adjusted the seasoning, covered the pan, and let it go on a low simmer for about 20 minutes. Ideally, the burgers should soak up the sauce a bit, so it couldn't hurt to poke a few holes in them to encourage that. By the end, there was a good amount of sauce to moisten the dry meat, and it actually tasted pretty good.
We served this with Cajun potato salad that Holt made for Memorial day. It was actually based on our previous New Orleans potato salad but used regular russet potatoes (boiled as unpeeled cubes, with a splash of Zatarain's in the water) instead of whole little redskins, added chopped red onion, and had an oil-vinegar-and-grain-mustard dressing rather than mayonnaise, since it was going to sit out on a warm picnic table for a while. Both were damn tasty, though cubing the potatoes before you boil them makes them break up a bit too much.