It is one of the most popular dishes almost all over the world, thanks to the fast food that has spread from end to end of the earth! Whether we are talking about the most greasy, fast food version, or the homemade version, one thing is certain: hamburgers are one of the most delicious foods available! The ingredients are a well done beef burger, a fluffy bun, a slice of cheese, lettuce, bacon, onions and various sauces. To complete the dish, of course, it must be accompanied by freshly fried potatoes! Leaving out any references to the extra calories we generously receive from this dish, see below the story of hamburgers, as presented in MentalFloss.
The ancestor of the hamburger
Exactly how a dish named after a German city, turned out to be one of the most popular food choice in the US, and not only, remains a puzzle. The earliest reference to the ancestor of hamburger is in an English cookbook from 1763. Hannah Glasse’s book «Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy» explains how anyone can make a Hamburg sausage.
The recipe was as follows:
We mix minced beef with suet, spices, wine, and rum and we fill in the content in an intestine, which then gets smoked and dried.
If anyone misses the last stages, minced meat with the other ingredients could become Hamburg steak. As strange as it seems, according to an article by Mark H. Zanger, Hamburg, Germany never had any special relationship with mince. According to public documents of Massachusetts since 1835, there were 689 samples of meat products tested during the war, of which 19 Hamburg steaks and 71 sausages were adulterated.
The Oxford dictionary defines Hamburg steak as a dish consisting meat balls as flat fillets, finely chopped lean beef, mixed with beaten eggs, chopped onions and spices, which are fried.
Hamburger meets the sandwich
According to the U.S. Library of Congress, the Louis’ Lunch Wagon shop in New Haven, Connecticut served the first hamburgers in 1895. Except that in their version they placed the hamburger inside of two slices of bread. The newspaper Tombstone Prospector Arizona, on September 5, 1896 wrote that the residents of Bisbee rejoiced at the arrival of a wagon which offered meals like pies, hot Tomales, hamburgers in buns and other treats, fully guaranteed to be free from all bad effects, nightmares, indigestion, etc.
In 1902 a member of the sorority ΔΣΔ was describing what he had experienced at the Fair Indiana State Fair: I ate a hamburger-sandwich! without specifying whether the sandwich was made with sliced bread or in a separate, round bun. According to another story, the newspaper said that Fletcher Davis, a cook from a small town in Texas, made the hamburger-sandwich popular in the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. In 1911, The Lunch Room book, which was aimed for restaurateurs, refers to two slices of bread which are used in the hamburger sandwich, but says that for sandwiches in general, some cities prefer round buns.
By Nicole P.
