Scenic Salisbury Steak - Route 66 Postcard Recipe

I love food and I love to travel, so it's only natural that as a seasoned veteran I've learned to travel light going, and not weigh myself down with souvenirs returning; such items that will only end up stored away and forgotten over the course of time.  So, collecting recipe postcards satisfies my curiosity about local cuisines, provides me with an excellent remembrance of my trip, and a way to recreate the tastier part of it to share with friends once I get home.

Click on this recipe to enlarge it and make it readable.  The only change I made was to add a packet of dry onion soup mix to the sauce in order to give it a more complex, richer flavor.

Today's dinner came from a Route 66 postcard from a collection that I acquired locally at the Missouri History Museum.  I've made this any number of times and each time we've throughly enjoyed this tasty meal of comfort food, and a bit of local history.

Served on an Inca Restaurantware (something else I collect) grill plate to be extra authentic.

I have a bit of a funny story about this recipe.  When I was recovering from an illness, my husband offered to make dinner.  Now he is an excellent chef, so something simple like this would normally pose no problem.  But, he is also a scholar and professor emeritus, who is constantly involved in one project or other and, well to be blunt, is the typical absent-minded professor.  When it came time to serve the meal he put before me the biggest piece of Salisbury steak I'd ever seen. I looked at him and said, "Oh, you made meat loaf!  I can't eat a whole meatloaf." He denied this and said it was the Salisbury steak recipe that I'd given him. Ummm, no, I'd made it before and it never looked anything like this rather challenging mound of meat.

I looked in the baking dish and asked where the other patties were.  "Others?" he asked.  "There were no others, the recipe said to 'form in 2 patties'."

I stared at him, mouth agape.  "No," I said, in my most diplomatic voice.  "You would not turn one and a half pounds of ground beef into two patties.  No."

He continued to insist, so I pulled out the recipe and as I read it a smile crossed my face.  The recipe read "form into patties."  INTO not TWO.  But knowing my dear husband as I do I'm sure he was involved in a number things at the time he read the recipe, his thoughts elsewhere.  And as he was working, repeated to himself "form into patties...form into pattie...form in two patties" and that's how he ended up with Salisbury meat loaves instead of Salisbury steak.

We laugh about this to this day.  As it turned out, the meatloaf thing wasn't half bad.  We froze one and split the other and both meals were equally delicious.

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