Let's have a look at MRE Menu 19: Beef Patty, Jalapeno Pepper Jack (Steak Haché au Fromage Pimenté). It's one of those things that's better in theory than practice. The beef patty was apparently introduced in 2013 and is the closest thing in the MRE line-up to a hamburger.
As mentioned passim MREs are pre-packaged "meals, ready-to-eat" invented for the US Armed Forces in the early 1980s and revised continuously since then. There are around two dozen different menus but they taste very similar. There are vegetarian options; I've tried a couple, including tuna and vegetable pasta.
For civilian use MREs are a novelty. They are designed to last for around five years in cool conditions, much longer refrigerated, but they're too bulky to form the basis of a long-term food store. They're also too large for hiking and generate a lot of plastic waste. Purely as food they're too expensive. They're novelties, but what's wrong with that?
Menu 19 is almost stereotypically American. It's essentially a chunk of beef with a big cookie and some M and Ms, plus a cup of coffee. Most MREs are designed so that the main meal can be eaten in several different ways but Menu 19 is unusually straightforward, although it makes up for it with a lot of sauces.
From left to right the beef patty, some mustard, and a big cookie.
Plus M and Ms, a couple of tortillas, ketchup, and cherry cobbler.
And the typical accessories - coffee instant type II, sugar, creamer, salt, matches, a spoon, a towel, gum - plus an orange drink and, intriguingly, cheese spread with bacon.
I've tried the cherry cobbler before, on Lantau Island in Hong Kong. I was hallucinating from dehydration at the time. My pee was black! But I didn't die, and that was because the cherry cobbler had some moisture. It's the fruit filling from a cherry crumble, minus the crumble. It looks horrible but it tastes great:
Before I tried anything else I decided to heat up the main meal, which is a small chunk of processed meat. I imagined that I was preparing space food:
While the flameless ration heater fizzed away I made some coffee. As always it gives me a mental image of a canteen in a Post Office depot, where the walls are breezeblocks painted white with health and safety posters.
It tastes "hard" rather than "smooth". Truth be told there's nothing really wrong with it; imagine the cheapest instant coffee you can get. The provided quantities are perfect for a single cup but would be very weak in an army canteen. It's odd that they don't include more coffee, but perhaps US soldiers have access to coffee elsewhere.
Next I munched on the M and Ms, which I have to call "M and Ms" because the Blogger platform doesn't render ampersands properly.
They are, unsurprisingly, regular M and Ms. They're not special army M and Ms with extra vitamins or anything.
At this point I decided to dive into the main meal. As mentioned up the page MREs are generally designed so that you can do a little bit of creative cooking, but in the absence of crackers there is only one way to prepare Menu 19. A beef patty covered in cheese, wrapped in a tortilla. The patty isn't the most visually appealing food I have ever seen:
The simulation of griddled beef is surprisingly good, but it's so obviously not a piece of griddled beef that it looks terrible. In theory I could have spread the cheese onto the tortillas and had cheese tortillas, but what would I have done with the piece of beef? It's only a few bites big. I ended up making some quote burgers unquote:
The meat was just tasteless food mass. It would have benefited from some kind of burger sauce; in the end I saved the ketchup and mustard for later. The cheese was by far the best-tasting and indeed only-tasting element of the main meal.
The tortillas actually smell quite nice straight from the packet, but they taste floury and dry. I understand that some versions of Menu 19 have wheat bread instead of tortillas; why not a burger bun? Other MREs have burger buns.
I finished off the meal with the cookie, which was dry and crumbly but perfectly fine. The Beverage Base Orange Type III was subtler and less chalky than I expected:
I mean, it's still not good, it's just not as bad as I expected. It's just cheap orange squash. After scoffing the above I was left with some gum, a moist towelette - perhaps the COVID crisis will give me something to do with the moist towelettes I have amassed - and some iodised salt, which I keep to one side to sprinkle on wounds. And of course I was left with another MRE spoon. They're surprisingly sturdy. I now have one for every room in the house, including the toilet, for reasons I will not divulge.
Is that it? Menu 19 is disappointing. The main element is a paltry bit of beef. Even if it was terrific it would still be just a small chunk of meat. The big problem is that it's mostly sugary sweets with an inflexible main meal. Just adding crackers and replacing the M and Ms with some kind of savoury snack - and replacing the tomato sauce and mustard with oniony burger sauce - would have expanded the creative potential immensely.
Ultimately Menu 19 just raises the question of why there isn't a proper MRE hamburger. There's an MRE pizza, but no hamburger. Is the US government worried about stereotyping? Who knows.
