Putting the "Urghh" in Burger

It was National Burger Day this Thursday just gone. Did you know? Do you care? Probably not. Every pub and restaurant under the sun seemed to be tweeting about it to get the punters in, but prior to that the only reason I'd heard about it is that it was organised, and promoted ad nauseum, by Mr Hyde, one of the many email newsletters I find in my inbox on a daily basis. It is effectively an online spin-off of the men's lifestyle magazine Shortlist, though most of its content seems to be reviews of places to eat and drink in London, generally fairly biased in favour of anywhere that serves up huge slabs of meat, alongside plenty of craft beer with which to wash it all down.

There's certainly no shortage of places for them to review, with the explosion of places serving up American-style pulled pork, ribs, hot dogs and burgers over the last few years. The latter in particular is nothing new to British high streets of course, but it is only recently that the so-called 'gourmet' burger joints have started appearing everywhere, focusing on high quality ingredients for maximum flavour. Such places certainly aren't suggesting that these are healthier options though - in fact some places play on that by marketing their products as somewhat of a guilty pleasure. The Dirty Burger chain is a prime example, with their menus asking "How dirty will you go?" - i.e. how much extra cheese, bacon and so on do you want to add to their already calorie-laden eponymous burger.

So in their case, "dirty burger" means something naughty but nice - so bad, it's really, really good. But the term could just as well mean a burger that's so bad, it's just bad - and for that, it's time to crack open a tin.

Yes, tinned burgers in gravy, made by a company called Goblin. I found this on the shelves of a branch of Morrisons during a rare visit a few months back. I have to admit to being slightly disappointed that they've called them hamburgers, rather than just burgers, as otherwise they would be "Goblin burgers", suggesting they were made from the minced meat of some kind of grotesque malevolent dwarf-like creature. Maybe the Goblin company wanted to avoid that potential confusion.

I couldn't help but be reminded of the poem Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (although that concerns a market run by goblins, rather than one selling its meat). I wrote an essay about it at university, looking at its presentation of women in the Victorian age. It was, by quite some way, the worst essay I wrote during my time as a student. Apologies - that was a bit of a random sidetrack. But would the burgers be any better than my essay? It seemed unlikely. They didn't sound all that appetising to begin with - and then I looked at the list of ingredients:

A deep-fried "treat", in honour of Marguerite

Mentioning the 1940s-themed bar Cahoots in my last post reminded me, sadly, of the passing a couple of months ago of the great doyenne of thrifty wartime cooking, Marguerite Patten, at the ripe old age of 99.

After a brief stint as an actress and then a demonstrator for the Frigidaire company, Marguerite came to public attention during World War II working for the Ministry of Food, suggesting recipes that made the most of rationed foods and broadcasting these and other tips and essential skills on the BBC radio programme Kitchen Front. After the war she started to appear on television cookery programmes, but remained adamant that she was not a celebrity chef, saying "To the day I die, I'll be a home economist" in a 2011 interview. She had a staggering 170 cookery books to her name, including the 1960 glossy bestseller Everyday Cookbook in Colour, which was hugely influential at a time when most cookery were printed in black and white without any pictures at all.