I create audio for young and curious minds including multi-award-winning podcasts Mysteries of Science, The Week Junior Show, The National Trust Kids’ Podcast, and Activity Quest. Recognised as the most creative radio moment of the year, I made history by sending the first radio broadcast to space as featured in the 2023 Guinness World Records book. I write for Science+Nature magazine and freelance for Boom Radio, RadioDNS, and more.Music by Blue Dot Sessions.
https://adamstoner.com
Hemingway Hamburgers
This is a story about how one of the US’s most iconic writers created a recipe for one of the most iconic US meals.
My quest for this recipe has all the hallmarks of a Hemingway novel packed full of mystery and is set against the backdrop of war. And it all began with a single question. What’s the best burger ever?
I’d found this burger recipe online, supposedly one from Ernest Hemingway and with the help of Hemingway Home and the JFK Presidential Library, got to the bottom of it.
Hemingway spent a lot of his life divided between different homes. He lived in Cuba at this home, La Finca Vigia, from about 1939 to 1960.
Hemingway shot himself in 1961. Relations between the US and Cuba weren’t too great at that time and his wife, Mary, needed help getting back into Cuba to reclaim some documents, some papers, some memorabilia.
The Kennedy administration helped Mary get a special visa to get into Cuba and strike a deal where she would take as much as she could from the Finca in exchange for donating the house and what was left in it to the Cuban people.
This recipe was among the documents left behind.
She typed this recipe out for the Women’s Day encyclopaedia of cookery whilst Hemingway was still alive.
You can find it at adamstoner.com/burgers.
It’s a long and complex process, as you might imagine, featuring red wine and piccalilli, capers, and a bit of chemistry to mix up some discontinued ingredients. But it’s not hard to imagine, tucked away in his Cuban home and sheltered from the harsh sun, Hemingway and his wife and his young staff, all of whom called him Papa – that’s where the name of the recipe comes from – tucking into these burgers.
These are the best thing I’ve ever eaten. And I am not kidding.
This recipe, this burger, captures his journeys around the world, his ritzy personality, and the context in which it came to be, abandoned in the middle of a war-torn country, is incredibly Hemingway.
Whilst these burgers humanise a man who’s become a legend, even the most mundane aspects of his life, like what he ate for dinner, have helped turn Hemingway into an icon.
He was a master storyteller. And this unassuming sheet of yellowing paper is, in some weird way, yet another of his stories…