Looking back Why we love a burger
ON THE MENU: THAT ALL- AMERICAN ICON, THE HAMBURGER, AND A BITE- SIZE GUIDE TO ITS HISTORY
They’re so simple but so good. Convenient as well as tasty; the triumph of sticky fingers over stuffier fine dining. They’re the stuff of family outings and teenage escapades, both the taste of nostalgia and reassuringly familiar. No wonder it’s hard to resist a good burger.
Although the hamburger, as we know it, is only around 100 years old, its ancestry goes much further back. In first-century Rome, a dish of ground meat was served with pine nuts, pepper and wine and garum flavourings. A 1747 cookery book described the “Hamburg” Sausage as a smoked sausage of ground beef flavoured with ingredients including nutmeg, garlic, red wine and rum to be served on toast.
THE ALL- AMERICAN BURGER
However, the burger we know and love is all-American, linked back to the cattle drives of the pioneers. The fertile plains, brutally purged of their indigenous population and wildlife, were not only opened up to cattle farmers, but also rapidly connected via the railroad network. By 1865, Chicago was the meatpacking centre of the world.
The Hamburg steak – beef scrapings patted together and browned – came with German immigrants to the New World in the late 19th century. But an American entrepreneurial spirit drove developments from there: as factories and newspaper offices extended their opening
“So simple, but so good… Burgers are the triumph of sticky fingers over stuffier fine dining”
hours, wagons sprang up to serve food throughout the day, some with grills to offer hot food such as Hamburg steaks – the origins of the “fast food” aspect of the hamburger.
As for who served the first hamburger, there are many competing claims. At the 1885 Seymour Fair in Wisconsin, “Hamburger Charlie” Nagreen apparently squashed a beef meatball between bread slices so his customers could eat and walk, while, in 1900, Louis Lassen of New Haven served his steak sandwiched between two slices of toast.
WHITE CASTLE AND THE FIVE- CENT SLIDER
The big leap forward for the burger as we know it came in the 1920s. Back in 1916, Walter Anderson had started serving burgers with specifically created buns. Five years later, with entrepreneur Billy Ingram, he opened the first White Castle restaurant, in Wichita, Kansas, selling what they called the five-cent slider – a squared-off patty of beef, pressed thin and served in a burger bun, with onions and a slice of gherkin. It was, in other words, a genuine hamburger. With a gleaming white exterior based on the Chicago Water Tower, their restaurant was a resounding riposte to those who only associated hamburgers with grubby, transitory food carts. They emphasised their meat’s quality – beef was delivered at least twice a day and customers could watch it being ground. Within nine years, White Castle had 116 restaurants and established the blueprint for the many chains that followed.
MCREVOLUTION
As the motorcar grew in importance to American life, so increased the popularity of the drive-in. In 1940s San Bernardino, California, the McDonald brothers, Maurice and Richard, opened a drive-in burger bar. The
brothers quickly deduced that by losing the cutlery and plates, getting customers to come to the counter to be served and then to dispose of their own waste, and combining this with a rapid, open kitchen, they could really put the fast into fast food.
It was, however, Ray Kroc, a milkshake machine seller, who helped McDonald’s become the global phenomenon it is today, negotiating a franchise in 1954. Under a banner of “Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value”, he perfected a combination of industrial design, menu, service and advertising. There were more than 700 McDonald’s across the United States by 1965; two years later they went global. It’s become central to American society: since its founding until the year 2000, one-eighth of the potential American working population had been employed by McDonald’s at some point.
A VERY BRITISH BURGER
The main rival to McDonald’s – Burger King – dates in its current form from the 1950s, which is also when the burger arrived on our shores. Wimpy had been founded in 1934 in the United States, named after the Popeye character J Wellington Wimpy, but opened in Britain 20 years later as a concession within a Lyons Corner House. And, while the company no longer exists Stateside, there are still 81 in Britain, serving original menu items such as the Wimpy Egg Burger and Wimpy Kingsize.
Our taste for burgers has been fairly constant ever since, with British-born chains such as Hard Rock Cafe and Ed’s Easy Diner tapping into a fondness for Americana, while newer ventures offer more experimental versions catering to our increasingly adventurous appetites. We even have our own National Burger Day at the end of August although, in 2017, this could almost be any day of the year, as this very American creation has taken over the world. We’re seemingly never more than a few bites away from a burger…