---
title: 'The Bizarre History of Salisbury Steak'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=w14sPMjtp48'
video_id: 'w14sPMjtp48'
date: 2026-07-28
duration_sec: 1374
---

# The Bizarre History of Salisbury Steak

> Source: [The Bizarre History of Salisbury Steak](https://youtube.com/watch?v=w14sPMjtp48)

## Summary

This video explores the history of Salisbury steak, from its origins as a Civil War-era health food devised by Dr. James Henry Salisbury to its evolution into a staple of TV dinners and school lunches. The host also recreates a USDA school lunch recipe from the 1980s, providing a step-by-step cooking tutorial.

### Key Points

- **Salisbury Steak’s Terrible Name and Origins** [00:00] — The dish is named after Dr. James Henry Salisbury, who created it as a treatment for dysentery during the American Civil War. The original recipe was lean beef pulp, broiled without seasoning.
- **USDA School Lunch Recipe** [01:52] — The host uses the 1980s USDA 'Quantity Recipes for School Food Service' recipe, which includes ground beef, rolled oats, egg, water, beef stock, non-fat dry milk, and dehydrated onions—notably no salt.
- **Cooking the Steaks** [03:17] — Mix ingredients, form into 1/3-cup patties (oval shaped like school lunches), bake at 350°F for 25 minutes. The host also makes a brown gravy from butter, flour, beef stock, onion powder, and white pepper.
- **Dr. Salisbury’s Experiments** [07:14] — In 1854, Salisbury began mono-diets on himself and paid subjects. He found lean beef provided maximum nourishment with minimal digestive effort, leading to his 'muscle pulp of beef' as a cure for dysentery.
- **Civil War Application** [09:21] — During the Civil War, Salisbury treated Union soldiers suffering from dysentery and diarrhea with his beef diet. He incorrectly blamed food rather than germs, but his diet proved effective.
- **Post-War Fad Diet** [11:48] — After the war, Salisbury promoted meat as the exclusive diet, claiming vegetables caused noxious fumes leading to heart failure, tuberculosis, and mental illness. By the 1880s, he was a celebrity health guru.
- **Rebranding and World War I** [14:39] — In 1890, 'muscle pulp of beef' was rebranded as 'Salisbury steak' in newspapers. During WWI, 'hamburg steak' was also renamed Salisbury steak due to anti-German sentiment.
- **TV Dinner and School Lunch Era** [19:07] — Salisbury steak surged in popularity with TV dinners in the 1950s and became a school lunch staple by the 1970s. It later declined as processed food lost favor.

### Conclusion

Salisbury steak is a simple, nostalgic dish with a surprisingly rich history, evolving from a Civil War medical treatment to a frozen dinner classic. While it may lack seasoning, its story is anything but bland.

## Transcript

Today I'm making a dish with an absolutely terrible name, muscle pulp of beef, Now, when I think of Salisbury steak, I think of TV dinners and school lunches.  
But it actually got its start during the American Civil War. So, I am going to recreate as I uncover how the American Civil War led to one of America's first fad diets, the Salisbury steak.
So thank you to Hungryroot for sponsoring this video as we enjoy Salisbury Steak Day this time on Tasting History.
So Salisbury steak is named after its creator, Dr. James Henry Salisbury. Gross. But he developed the dish as a treatment against diseases like dysentery, which were ripping through the Union Army during the Civil War.  
So Dr. Salisbury's solution was to feed these  soldiers a diet entirely of lean beef with all of the connective tissue and sinew removed.  This beef would then be chopped into a pulp  
and "The pulp should not be pressed too firmly  together before broiling, or it will taste livery.   Simply press it sufficiently to hold it together.  Make the cakes from/ an inch to an inch thick.   Broil slowly and moderately well over a fire free from blaze and smoke."
Then he says that if you wish you can add a little bit of  butter, salt or pepper but no other seasonings.   Then you can top it off with "either Worcestershire  or Halford sauce, mustard, horseradish or lemon juice...
Not entirely different from what we think of as Salisbury steak today, but a lot simpler. And so I have opted for a later recipe, specifically   the one that I grew up eating in the Madison  school district of Phoenix, Arizona.
Actually, pretty much all of the school districts in the  United States in the 80s and 90s used this recipe.   It comes from the USDA's 'Quantity Recipes for  School Food Service'.
Now, I've cooked from this cookbook before, namely the sloppy joe and the  rectangular pizza. And I do so because frankly,   it's just nostalgic for me, and so let me indulge. But there is an issue because all the recipes are either for 50 or even 100 students, and I just don't need that much Salisbury steak.
Now I'm going to cut this way back to about 12 portions, for which you will need 34 oz or 960 grams of ground beef, 3/4 cup plus 1 tbsp or 85 grams of rolled oats, one egg,
1/4 cup or 60 milliliters of water, 1/4 cup or 60 ml of beef stock, 2 tbsps non-fat dry milk, 2 tbsps dehydrated onions, Now you may note that there is an ingredient that seems to be missing here, namely salt.
The recipe does not include any salt. I mean, there's going to be some salt in the beefstock, but not very much. And it's not like they thought that the lunch lady would just know to add salt because salt is added in other meat recipes, but not in this one. So,  
while I'm going to follow the recipe as written, I would not fault you for adding a couple teaspoons of salt to your meat. Either way, start by mashing the ground beef up in a bowl and then add in the seasonings.
You got the pepper, the parsley, and the dehydrated onions. Then add in the egg and mix thoroughly. Now you can actually just take everything and put it in a stand mixer and mix it all at once, but if you are doing it by hand,
Next, I went with the rolled oats, just a little  at a time, and then the dry milk. Finally, add in the water and the beefstock and continue to mix until everything is fully combined.
Then it says the steak should be measured out into 1/3 cup portions. And you can just pat the meat into a patty Now, some people shape their Salisbury steak into  an actual steak shape,
kind of like the emergency steak that I made from World War II that was meant to look like a T-bone, but the kind we always had in school were just shaped like little fat ovals so that's what I'm doing. Once you've filled up a baking tray, set it in the oven at  350° Fahrenheit, 175° C, and cook for 25 minutes.  
Now these Salisbury steaks are pretty simple, so  they don't take that long to make. But sometimes I make things here on the channel that take hours, really all day, to prepare and film. And so at the end of the day, the last thing I want to do  is make dinner for myself.
And I don't want to do takeout every night. So, I have come to rely on the delicious and quick meals Hungryroot is a great way to get nutritious meals at home without having to spend a lot of time cooking or shopping.
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Just follow my link in the description or head to hungryroot.com and use my code TASTINGHISTORY to get 40% off of your first box plus a free item of your choice for life. Now the steaks are going to just take a few more minutes, but you can't serve these things plain.
They have to be served with a sauce. And the cookbook says that you can  either serve them with meatless tomato sauce   or as was common in my school, brown gravy, recipe G3, which calls for 2 tbsps of butter, 1/4 cup plus 1 and 1/2 teaspoons or 35 grams of flour,
2 and 1/2 cups or 590 ml of beefto/ teaspoon of onion powder, I'm using white pepper because I just rarely have a chance to use it on this show.
So start by melting the butter in a saucepan and then add the flour and stir it in. Let it cook on medium, stirring often, until it is golden brown, about 8 minutes or so.
Then add in the beefstock just a little bit at a time. And then whisk the rue into the stock. And once all of the liquid is added, add in the onion powder and the pepper. Continue to stir over medium heat until it starts to boil.  
And once boiling, reduce the heat to medium and  simmer for six to eight minutes And as it thickens, I just wanted to let you know about the second channel that I recently started.
It's in conjunction with YouTube. Essentially, it's marathons of old Tasting History videos It's a way to give old dead videos a second life. But   this video needs no second life because it's not  old. It is new. 
about how the Salisbury steak started out as medicine for Civil War soldiers.
In the years leading up to the American Civil War,  James Henry Salisbury Now this was really the dawn of germ theory. And while Salisbury was an early proponent of the theory,
treatment was not really available for most of the associated diseases. This is after all a time before it was standard practice to wash your hands before performing surgery. It was So while some diseases like smallpox had vaccines already kicking about,
most ailments, especially those of the gut, relied pretty much entirely on a person's diet as a way to cure them. And so that's what Salisbury really kind of focused on.
But he found it difficult to figure out what foods did and did not cause discomfort or issues So "In 1854, the idea came to me, in one of my solitary hours, to try the effects of living exclusively upon one food at a time.  
This experiment I began on myself alone at first...  On this account, I opened this line of experiments with baked beans. I had not lived upon this food for three days before light began to break.  
I became very flatulent and constipated, head  dizzy, ears ringing, limbs prickly, But after a while, this diet of exclusively eating baked beans started to have some positive effects.
And so he decided to expand the experiment and paid six men to also live on a diet Then the next year he tried the same kind of thing out with different foods on different people.
Foods including asparagus, corn, rice, potatoes, beets,   He also tried a diet of lean beef which seemed to be the most effective.
"This is the muscle pulp of beef prepared as heretofor described, when it affords the maximum of nourishment with  the minimum of effort to the digestive organs.   Nothing else but this food, except on occasional  change to broiled mutton."
Salisbury was able to expand his experiments in 1861 when the American Civil War broke out. See, he was put in charge of a number of patients in Union hospitals
and watched as more men died of dysentery and diarrhea than they did of gunshot wounds. he did not yet make the connection that many of these people were  getting sick because of the germs in dirty water,  
nor did he think that it was the germs necessarily on food. But he did make the connection that it was the food itself causing these issues. And he pinpointed numerous foods that seem to cause  
bowel issues of all sorts, none worse than hardtack. "Upon a careful and extensive examination, it has been found that when soldiers are on the march, from the fact that they can only carry cooked meats for a few day's rations."  
To prove these foods to be particularly delotterious,  he had three men put on a monotrophic diet of nothing "October 12th, at noon, began feeding the men exclusively upon Army biscuit.
For drink used water, to which at dinner  and tea about one ounce of good whiskey was added."   Then he spent the next month cataloging in rather  graphic detail the bathroom habits of these men  
or rather lack of bathroom habits because they were plugged up. At the same time he put several other men on diets of other foods and wrote down what was going on with their bathroom habits.  
Some of the foods namely peas and beets would  have ill effects within just a couple of days.   Other foods could take a week even two weeks or  up to 45 days to show issues.
Things like bread, and and rice, and tapioca But then there were certain foods that seemed to never produce bad effects, "Many of them have continued this as an exclusive diet from three to four years,
Thus, his muscle pulp of beef became one of the most effective treatments for dysentery during the Civil War. And even after the war, he continued trials and experimentation and really went
wholehog on this idea that meat as an exclusive diet was the way to go. it should be no more than one third of your diet.  uh preferably zero, but no more than one third
because vegetables, especially when raw,  produced kind of noxious fumes and gases   inside of your body that when built up could lead to heart failure,
or tuberculosis, I think he said tumors  or even mental illness. In addition, he considered the human tooth to be physical proof that meat By the 1880s, Dr. Salisbury had become a mashup of Dr. Atkins and the Liver King.
In 1888 he published his book on the subject. And while it wasn't exactly riveting, one of his acolytes, the  British author Elma Stuart, wrote a bestseller called 'What Must I Do Well and How Can I Keep So?'  
In it, she claimed that Dr. Salisbury's diet  cured her of a 9-year illness, and it went viral and really his name became well known throughout the English-speaking world.
Part of this was not just because his diet, a 12-week diet of his meat and hot water could cure all sorts of bowel issues, His New York practice was huge with people traveling from all corners of the globe to eat his meat pulp,
And as his fame grew, so too did his dietary claims. He said that the diet could cure all sorts of other non-digestive issues.
It would make your skin glow. It would give you lots of energy like when you were a kid. And it would even make you just more attractive in general.   This led some people to think that maybe he was  a bit of a charlatan.
Like in 1894, newspapers ran an article titled "A Nest of Cranks. How Dr. Salisbury of Hot Water Fame, starves His Patients.   Hollow-Eyed Human Dupes who imagine they are being cured....
Would I be beautiful and have all the world at my feet?... Would I leap upstairs two steps at a time? Would I purge my body of all sin and disease? Then must I take the hot-water cure and eat Salisbury steaks?"
For several columns of the newspaper, the author ridicules the emaciated men and women slowly wasting away But the opinion does seem to have been a minority one because Salisbury's steaks
had become really quite popular even outside of the medical world.   I do think that it helped that in 1890 his muscle  pulp of beef did get a rebrand as newspapers now printed recipes for Salisbury steak.
Now these early recipes were as plain as plain could be. Most included nothing but ground meat with maybe a little flour, salt, pepper, and brown in butter.   And then they often appeared alongside recipes for hamburg steaks which were typically seasoned with onion, sage, and thyme.
Now, by the early 20th century, you do start to see some of the Salisbury steak recipes become a little bit more elaborate. Perhaps my favorite is from San Francisco in around 1910, and it includes onion juice and is served with mashed potatoes and a cream sauce with horseradish.
But perhaps most fascinating is that each steak is topped with a baked banana.   Though I think this is a one-off because I never  saw that again in any of the other recipes. What I do find interesting though is that today we think  of Salisbury steak as a lunch or maybe a dinner,  
not as a breakfast, but in the late 19th and early  20th century, it often appears on breakfast menus   And it is often paired with the more flavored, more seasoned hamburg steak,
the precursor to what we call a hamburger today. But that did change, at least for a while, in 1918 when the US went to war with Germany. See, when we first entered World War I, a number of foods got a name change because they were associated with Germany.
And so hamburg steak was often recristened as Salisbury steak. "It's now Salisbury, not Hamburg Steak... New name for Hamburg Steak. This is an American restaurant."
More ridiculous, I think, though, was that for a time sauerkraut was renamed Liberty cabbage, Now while Salisbury steak had become  a staple of the diet by this time,  
Even by 1910, only 5 years after Salisbury died,   a newspaper article credited a totally different doctor with its creation, a Dr. Burke.  
"Salisbury steak is a near relation to hamburger. It is one of Dr. Burke's fads, obtained from Salisbury of England who, together with fruit employed it as a cure all." Sort of a slap in the face because one, he was  not from Salisbury, England, Dr. Salisbury.
But also Salisbury would never have paired this with fruit. He thought fruit was bad. So yeah. It does seem that people pretty much forgot  where the name came from pretty quickly.
A lot of stories in the 20s, 30s, 40s up through the 50s  usually credit it to coming from Salisbury, England or a town called Salisbury in North Carolina.
"Whoever first concocted the dish known as Salisbury steak never got the recognition... Chances are that some now forgotten dining car chef bashed up the first chopped meat labeled as 'Salisbury steak'...
on a dining car that ran between Asheville and Salisbury." Dr. Salisbury did get a bit of a nod as the creator when another doctor, Frank McCoy, published an article in hundreds of newspapers in 1931 where he said that Salisbury's diet
could treat both rheumatism and Bright's disease, which is a kidney ailment. "Three times daily, eat a half pound of Salisbury steak with as much celery or sliced tomatoes as desired, but no other food.
A half hour before each meal, drink a pint of warm water and also sip another pint of warm water while eating the meal. Also, take two daily enemas to assure free cleansing of the bowels." Now, Salisbury steaks did start to lose popularity in the 1940s and 50s, namely because  
hamburgers made a real big comeback. And by the 60s, it was seen as really old-fashioned dish, kind of a food of a bygone era. "A comeback for Salisbury steak... Salisbury steak, relic of late Victorian cooking!...
Once in a while, this dish is listed on a restaurant menu, but it's not often come upon in home kitchens." That article tried to bring back the Salisbury steak. But what really did it
was the popularization of the TV dinner. Originally introduced in 1953, the TV dinner was all the rage by the early 60s. And by 1970, one of the most popular options was the Salisbury steak.  
And this is also when it became a staple of the  school lunch across the United States. Eventually, Salisbury steak would kind of lose favor  because it was often seen as a processed food,   but it's not really. It's no more processed than
It's pretty simple, actually. And so I don't quite get why it lost popularity,   but it did. But right now, my kitchen smells rather nostalgic, rather
So I am going to give this Salisbury steak of my youth a try. And here we are, Salisbury steak with gravy from the USDA's 'Quantity Recipes for School Food Service'.  
And at first I was like, oh, gross. And then  I was like, wait, that is how it's supposed to be a little congealed by the time you actually paid and got it to the table. Anyway,
[chomp] Tastes like the Salisbury steak of my youth.
Could definitely use some salt. A little salt would really um go a long way, I think. But   the flavor is actually quite nice. It just could use a little oomph of the from the salt.  
I don't like pick out any of the parsley or  like the oatmeal. I'm not sure what the oatmeal-  it uses rolled oats and doesn't say to mash them or anything.   I would think if they were ground up it would  maybe work as a binder, but you don't really need them.
They're not bad. It's just superfluous. It's a pretty simple dish. It's pretty good, though. Also, just to be cheeky,  
I made some potatoes and uh scooped them out with  a ice cream scoop just like they did at school.   And they aren't regular mashed potatoes. They are  the kind that use dehydrated like flaked potatoes,  
which is what the recipe in the cookbook calls for. 35 years ago. X_x No, it's fine. You could though
because it's really, really easy but maybe add some more spices. Definitely add some salt, I think. There are so many other recipes out there for Salisbury steak as well.   But it is usually a pretty I don't want to  say bland, just a pretty simple dish.
It just is. So I can see why it kind of  lost popularity. The sauce on top is- is really what's going to give you more flavor, the gravy or if you're putting some other sort of sauce on. So,
yeah, make it if you got nothing else to do, but otherwise,   go buy a Hungry Man Dinner or something. Now  that is processed food, I'm sure. Anyway,   and I will see you next time on Tasting History.