Special Edition: A nostalgic comfort meal, inspired by "The Bear"

Elevate Hamburger Helper like Chef Sydney

You can tell a lot about a person based on their feelings about Hamburger Helper.

This is coming from someone who never had it until recently, and only out of my loyalty to testing what I make and, well, “The Bear.”  Every season of that show features a must-try culinary treat or five for the foodies in its audience.

For its fourth, flavor-seekers turned their attention to the shelf-stable dinner kit favored by yesterday’s working moms, thanks to “Worms,” the latest season’s fourth episode. This is the one where Ayo Edebiri’s Sydney Adamu visits her cousin Chantel (Danielle Deadwyler) to get her hair braided, but ends up teaching Chantel’s 11-year-old daughter T.J. (Arion King) how to class up a meal that comes in a box.

Syd doesn’t find Hamburger Helper in her cousin’s kitchen, though. She and T.J. obtain it at a local convenience store bathed in unappetizing fluorescent lighting. Instead of heading right back to Chantel’s place, however, they make one more stop at a sunlit supermarket with spacious nooks and exposed brick walls, where the shelves offer gourmet canned tomatoes and luscious produce.

This is in keeping with the show’s calling card of marrying high and low culinary traditions, presenting the concept of upscale into a state of mind. Syd is a Chicago South Sider raised in households like T.J.’s, with a working parent lacking time to cook or money to burn.

But as Edebiri and her co-star Lionel Boyce infuse into their co-written episode, that doesn’t mean settling for bland and cheap. With reasonably priced additions like fresh onion and panko crumbs, Syd’s Hamburger Helper effort doesn’t taste like it came out of a box.

What we talk about when we talk about Hamburger Helper

General Mills introduced Hamburger Helper in 1971 to offer working mothers a convenient, budget-conscious way to feed a family with minimum effort. Employing a mascot resembling a Disney character’s glove didn’t hurt its popularity with kids, either.

Thus, Hamburger Helper is a deeply nostalgic grocery item for Gen Xers and older Millennials, holding a special place in the memory beside other delights that Mom used to make. Unless your mom’s budget-conscious philosophy of making everything from scratch led her to shun most pre-fab meals, as mine did.

This is not to say the dish it represents was never part of my life. Behind the branding, Hamburger Helper is a low-effort single-skillet meal with pre-measured flavorings. All you need is a pound of lean ground meat, water and milk, and you can have an inexpensive, filling dinner ready in around 20 minutes.

But if you’re willing to spend a few more minutes measuring out the right seasonings and chopping up a few fresh additions, you can have dinner ready in, say, 45 minutes. Either way, it’s an affordable option that doubles as an indicator of economic anxiety in times like these.

A recent New York Times story reveals that sales of Hamburger Helper are up 14.5% in the year through August, although the insta-dinner classic isn’t alone in this popularity spike. Nervous shoppers are stocking up on canned fish, boxed mac and cheese and beans. Rice purchases are up by 7.5%.

Hamburger Helper’s current parent company, Eagle Foods, told the Times that economic anxiety isn’t the sole reason it glad-handed its way back into fashion. Its guest star appearance on “The Bear” also beefed up sales, championing the elevation of humble foods that culinary snobs once wrote off as tacky.

Choose your own nostalgia-flavored adventure

Using an enameled skillet, Syd shows T.J. how to brown the meat along with the onions, then adds tomato paste, explaining that caramelizing it enriches the sauce. Then she adds the contents of the flavoring packet to the meat before pouring water into the pan. Syd also throws in heavy cream at some point, although the episode doesn’t show the proportions she uses. (Presumably, it replaces about half of the milk.)

Once the food has simmered and the sauce has thickened, she throws some of the cheese into the pan. Panko crumbs go on top, and it’s ready.

Syd chooses Cheeseburger Macaroni-flavored Hamburger Helper, but my husband selected the lasagna flavor, recalling in a voice quavering like a Dickensian orphan that if he and his sister were lucky, that’s what their mom or dad would make for them.

So I took a crack at it, hoping to tweak that memory into an improved adult version.

Homemade Hamburger Helper copycats using fresh ingredients are plentiful – some simple, others complex. (Here’s Ashlie’s recipe, which is a great place to start.) But I think the key to adopting Sydney’s method is to use what’s readily available.

Her onion and caramelized tomato paste hacks work well with the lasagna’s flavor profile, although before I browned my ground turkey, I also sauteed some minced garlic. Lacking panko in my pantry, I sliced some stale Italian bread into cubes and tossed them into a food processor. The resulting crumbs were fried in olive oil with ¼ teaspoon of Italian seasoning and grated Parmesan until crisp.

In lieu of heavy cream, I added a few tablespoons of butter along with the milk. I also used pre-shredded cheese from a package of Trader Joe’s Quattro Formaggi mix I found in my refrigerator’s dairy drawer, topping the finished dish with chopped parsley, fresh spinach and fresh tomatoes.

These additions don’t necessarily work for every flavor of Hamburger Helper. You can read the list of ingredients and amplify what’s there or add flavors that complement the mix. The one seasoning you probably don’t need to add is salt, since the product contains somewhere between 25% and 30% of the recommended daily value of sodium in each serving.

Since Hamburger Helper is a comfort all-star, your diners probably won’t be concerned with such details. Like T.J., they should appreciate your effort to nourish and soothe by making a dish that mom or dad used to, only updated and upgraded. 

While they cook together, Syd and T.J. share stories about their work and school experiences, finding common ground in navigating people who don’t treat them as well as they should.

Once Chantel returns home and finishes Sydney’s braids, T.J. sends the chef off with a tight embrace and the ultimate compliment. “You’re a good cook,” T.J. tells Syd, “and not just because you’re better than my mom.”

Chantel playfully argues that she can’t help that. But if T.J. is willing to pass along what she learned from Syd, perhaps she can.

Read more about food in “The Bear” from Salon

• “The Bear” showed us how easy it is to care for people, 3 eggs at a time

• We sampled that Orwellian butter from “The Bear”

• The real star of FX’s “The Bear”? San Marzano tomatoes

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