Hamburger Helper and Chicken Kiev

I was a Hamburger Helper stan well into adulthood, and I’m not even sorry about it.

We ate a lot of it when I was a kid because we didn’t have any money. My mother was a single mother with four kids—one of them with special needs—so we ate what we had, and what we seemed to always have were boxes and boxes of Hamburger Helper. There was this other thing she’d make, too. I guess it could be called Tuna Noodle Casserole, but she used macaroni, not noodles. It worked. Canned tuna (chunk light; this was before we all went apeshit for albacore), cream of mushroom soup, a can of peas, and macaroni. It sounds disgusting now, and it probably was then, too, but we were kids and we were hungry, so it was dinner whether we wanted it to be or not.

My favorite Hamburger Helper was the beef stroganoff, because it had an air of European sophistication to it. Swedish meatball Hamburger Helper came along later, when I was in my late teens, and it was good, too. But nothing compared to that stroganoff.

When I was thirteen or fourteen and we were doing slightly better financially because my mother had married her asshole husband, my aunt Joan invited us to a dinner at her house. My uncle Jack was an optometrist and Joan was his wife, so she was—in my eyes, at least—a society doyenne. Her house was all thick carpet and smooth chintz, with real art on the walls, and a kitchen modeled after Julia Child’s. Joan was a beast in the kitchen, too, and this particular dinner would be a Russian menu, she told us. I imagined beef stroganoff, the real kind with chunks of tender beef and mushrooms, not the kind that came out of a box and required an imagination. I wondered if there would be caviar. I wondered if I’d like it.

Jack and Joan were hosting a Chinese family of genius-level scientists for this Russian dinner and I wilted under the weight of the realization that no matter what I said or did, I’d make a fool of myself. So I said as little as possible, just sat and studied the pills on my cheap sweater, the scuffs on my cheap sneakers, my cheap socks showing under the hem of my cheap jeans. I listened to the eldest daughter of the family discuss the research she was doing. I’ve forgotten what it was at this point, but I will never forget the sound of her voice and the way she pronounced her words, how smooth her tone and delivery were. She was smart and confident and successful and she knew it. She didn’t eat beef stroganoff from a box.

For dinner, Joan had made borscht, which she served in clear glass cups with sour cream and—get this—orange zest grated over each one. Fucking orange zest. On fucking borscht. Joan did not play. And I devoured mine. I wanted more, but I didn’t want to look like the poor kid, begging for more while everyone else was satisfied with their portion, since it was just the first course and meant to whet our appetites for what would follow. Patricia (that was the eldest daughter’s name) came to my rescue. “It was good, wasn’t it?” I nodded. Joan sprang up from her chair. “There’s certainly more!” Proud of herself and so poised. Always poised. I ate two more cups.

But there was no beef stroganoff. No, Joan had made something called “Chicken Kiev,” which I was certain I would be disappointed by. I was glum and silent as I took my seat at Joan’s massive dining room table across from Patricia. “I’m so excited,” she said, to no one in particular. I wasn’t, though I longed to share her excitement about whatever the hell Chicken Kiev would turn out to be.

I don’t remember anything about the rest of that dinner, after Joan served us each our Chicken Kiev. I have no remembrance of the sides she made, or what the dessert was, but I do remember that when I cut into my Chicken Kiev, butter exploded from it and I was intrigued. I took a tentative bite of it and had a break with reality because Joan’s Chicken Kiev was unlike anything I’d ever eaten or have eaten since. It was absolutely better than Hamburger Helper beef stroganoff. I’ve spent my life since that moment chasing the joy that Chicken Kiev gave me that night. It made perfect sense what Patricia was so excited about. Apparently, she’d had it before. I should have trusted her scientific mind. Be excited, too, she was telling me, but I was too young, too uncultured, too accustomed to beef stroganoff from a box.

I can’t remember the last time I had any variation of Hamburger Helper, but my husband made some weight loss soup recently (cabbage, beans, turkey smoked sausage or something), and it smelled like Beanie Weenies. It tasted like Beanie Weenies, too. He’d never heard of Beanie Weenies, which I found hard to believe, but when I described what they were, he was aghast and declared that they sounded terrible, and why the hell would anyone eat something so disgusting?

But it reminded me of Hamburger Helper, which I’m sure he would find equally disgusting, but in my early twenties, I lived with a much older man who had a really good job, but he sucked at managing his money and gave most of it to his ex-wife, so I always worked two or three jobs at a time (one full-time, two part-time), and we were always broke. So we ate a lot of Hamburger Helper. I’m not nostalgic for it or anything—being broke, that is; I am totally nostalgic for Hamburger Helper—but it’s funny the things that trigger memories like that, and it blows my mind sometimes how far I’ve come from sitting on the floor, eating Hamburger Helper off paper plates because we couldn’t afford a table. Not even a coffee table. But, like it was when my mother fed it to me and my siblings, it was cheap and it filled my belly and when you don’t have a lot of money, one of the best feelings in the world is a full belly. And a full belly now doesn’t feel the same. I can’t explain it.

But, anyway. Yeah. Fucking Hamburger Helper.