Pasta and seasoning. And cheese I guess. Intended to me mixed with ground beef in order to stretch it into more meals. It’s not awful, just poor people food.
Comment on Great Depression: Part Deux
Lauchmelder@feddit.org 5 months ago
What in gods name even is this product?
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
brb@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Where’s the cheeseburger part?
vaultdweller013@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
That’s the ground beef, it’s basically Mac and cheese with hamburger meat IE ground beef.
Asidonhopo@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Its food for the new poor. The generationally poor were eating chicken wings back in the 80s for $0.19 a pound and loving them. Now, after the dreadful gentrification of wings post-9/11 we’ve got ways to stretch a dollar you’ll never learn unless you marry in.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
Kinda. I definitely had hamburger helper back in the 80s, but kit meals were a luxury we could only sometimes afford. Necessity is often the mother of culinary invention but even among “the poor” there’s some variability in cash and time (and information availability) constraints, and things like hamburger helper (cheap but not the cheapest, but also quick and easy to make) have been a fixture alongside the true broke-ass “we need food and have basically zero money” recipes.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 5 months ago
You mean pasta surrogate and cheese surrogate.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
The pasta is real, the seasoning is real, the cheese basically is not real.
For example, regular Cheeseburger Hamburger Helper contains trace amounts of blue cheese, which is absent from the Deluxe Cheeseburger Macaroni Hamburger Helper. The “Deluxe” product also contains parmesan cheese, palm oil, and lactic acid. These can all impact the texture and taste of the dish.
In an email to the Daily Dot, an Eagle Foods representative wrote the following: “The difference between the Double Cheeseburger Mac and the Cheeseburger Mac products are that, for the Double Cheeseburger, the ingredient ratios are slightly different and there is double the amount of cheese powder in the seasoning packet.”
dailydot.com/…/regular-deluxe-cheeseburger-hambur…
Its only ‘real cheese’ if you consider a dehydrated powder that you have to add butter or milk / water to, and then prepare with heat as a ‘cheese flavored sauce’ to be ‘real cheese’.
Yep, the tiny trace amounts of ‘100% Real Cheese!’ it contains are indeed tiny denydrated crumblets of real cheese… but I am fairly sure that by that metric, Cheetos are also ‘real cheese’.
For most Americans under the age of 40, the idea of making an actual cheese sauce out of… an actual block of actual dairy cheese from their refrigerator… that is literally a foreign concept.
Rooster326@programming.dev 5 months ago
Because to make a proper cheese sauce you need to make a proper roux, and idk who you think is teaching the average person to do that.
That is certainly not common knowledge today, and I doubt it has ever been common knowledge your everyday person would know. Nor is it easy to do for the inexperienced cook.
xorollo@leminal.space 5 months ago
I’m aware you can, but also cheese is expensive.
thinkercharmercoderfarmer@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
Usually not. I have not had the pleasure of this particular variety but in my experience it’s just plain old pasta and cheese and herbs.
Eheran@lemmy.world 5 months ago
What sort of cheese is that supposed to be?
BurgerBaron@piefed.social 5 months ago
Sodium’n Protein possibly slightly higher quality than Friskies cat food.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
It’s more of a BYO protein meal kit, with shelf stable seasoning+carb in a box, where you’re expected to add your own protein.