This Retro Ground Beef Meal From The '60s Deserves A Revival

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No matter how much you may like cooking, it can be easy to get into a rut with your meals when you're cooking for yourself or your family every day. When it comes to ground beef, that can mean it's usually ending up on your dinner plate as burgers, meatballs, or meatloaf. You can shake things up with some classic ground beef meals we all forgot, or with burger bundles, a retro dish from the '60s that deserves a comeback.

Burger bundles have shown up in some community and local organization cookbooks in past decades, but it seems they may have first appeared in 1967's "Jiffy Cooking" cookbook from Better Homes and Gardens magazine. True to the volume's "jiffy" name, the recipe is quicker and easier because two of the main ingredients, the stuffing mix and condensed soup, are pre-made packaged products.

Some recipes, like in the video above, call for mixing the meat with milk. However, one of the original recipes uses evaporated milk instead, and that may be the better option. Evaporated milk has some 60% less water than regular milk, so it's thicker and more concentrated. (Unlike condensed milk, it doesn't have added sugar.) That consistency can help hold the ground beef together better as it's shaped to enclose the stuffing, and it brings more richness to the meat. You also want to buy beef that's not too lean, such as an 80/20 lean-to-fat ratio, so it doesn't dry out as the stuffing inside cooks.

Any flavor stuffing mix can be used for the burger bundles, like those with sage or herbs, or that are meant for pork, chicken, or turkey, or even cornbread stuffing from brands like Stove Top or Pepperidge Farm. Once chosen, they can be zhuzhed up with more flavor. One way is to swap the liquid from water to chicken, turkey, or vegetable stock. Another is to add mix-ins such as bacon, sausage, sauteed onions or mushrooms, or chopped herbs like rosemary or thyme.

There are also options for the condensed soup that's the base of the sauce. Recipes usually call for standard cream of mushroom; however, Campbell's Cream of Mushroom with Roasted Garlic is used in the video. Another possible choice is combining half a can of cream of mushroom and half of either Campbell's Cream of Onion or Cream of Chicken and Mushroom. Yet another possibility is using the brand's Bean with Bacon soup and whirring it in a blender, which will make it thicker and creamier from the blended beans.

The ground beef can be boosted too by mixing minced garlic, finely-diced onion, or grated parmesan or Romano cheese into the raw meat before shaping it around the stuffing. Finally, once the burger bundles come out of the oven, they can be sprinkled with crumbled bacon or grated cheese, or topped with sauteed mushrooms. They're perfect served with mashed potatoes, with some of the sauce ladled on.