The History of the Hamburger

Podcast Transcript

One of the most popular foods around the world is the hamburger. If most people think of American foods, it is probably the first thing that comes to mind.

Hamburgers are pretty simple in terms of what they are composed of and how they are prepared, but they have developed an enormous amount of diversity.

But where did this popular food originally come from, and how did it manage to spread around the world?

Learn more about the history of the hamburger and how it grew in popularity on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

The hamburger is one of the most iconic and globally recognized foods in the world today. Its history is a tale of migration, innovation, and culinary evolution.

The modern hamburger, defined as a ground beef patty served inside a sliced bread bun, is the result of centuries of cultural exchange and shifting food habits.

Beef and bread have been around forever. I’ve previously done episodes on bread and the auroch, the ancient ancestor of modern cattle, and if you recall, both of these go back before written history.

While the base ingredients are simple and ancient, there is actually a bit more to it.

A hamburger isn’t just a beef sandwich, and here I’ll refer you to my episode on the history of the sandwich. A hamburger specifically involves ground beef.

The concept of consuming minced or ground meat dates back thousands of years.

Before mechanical grinding, people had to tenderize tough cuts of meat by hand-chopping or mincing with knives. This labor-intensive process was typically reserved for creating dishes from scraps or making the most of less desirable cuts that couldn’t be roasted or grilled successfully.

This technique also made it more digestible, especially for people with dental issues, or for easier preservation.

The Mongols, under Genghis Khan, are often credited with popularizing the practice of eating raw minced meat, a precursor to the development of steak tartare. Their horsemen would carry raw meat under their saddles to tenderize it as they rode.

That being said, what we think of as mince or ground beef wasn’t really that popular until the 19th century. You could easily cube meat into chunks for a stew, but the fine level of cutting and grinding necessary to make what we call ground beef usually wasn’t worth the effort.

The real transformation came during the Industrial Revolution when mechanical meat grinders were invented. These hand-cranked devices revolutionized home cooking by making ground meat preparation fast and consistent.

Suddenly, families could take advantage of cheaper cuts like chuck, round, or plate meat and transform them into something tender and flavorful.

Grinding meat accomplishes several things simultaneously: it breaks down tough muscle fibers that would otherwise require long, slow cooking; it distributes fat throughout the mixture more evenly, creating better flavor and moisture; and it allows seasonings to penetrate more thoroughly than they could in whole cuts.

There is also a downside to this. With a large cut of meat, you usually only have to worry about contamination and spoilage on the surface. This is why you can cook a steak rare on the inside, so long as the outside is cooked.

With ground beef, the surface area expands exponentially, and the area where things like E. coli could grow is much much larger. That is why you need to cook ground beef more thoroughly than steak.

Just as an aside, sausages, which had also been around a very long time, were mostly made with meat scraps, not ground meat like it is today.

The commercial meat industry quickly recognized ground beef’s potential. By the late 1800s, butchers were grinding meat in shops, and this coincided perfectly with America’s growing urban population, which needed convenient, affordable protein sources. Ground beef required less skill to cook than roasts or steaks, making it ideal for busy working families.

The direct ancestor of the hamburger came from the city of Hamburg, Germany.

Despite the name, Hamburg was not the location where the hamburger was invented. It was, however, the place that developed the Hamburg steak.

The Hamburg steak was a large beef patty that was served as a meal. Think of it more as a flat meatloaf than a modern hamburger patty. It often contained onions, pepper, and other seasonings and vegetables. It is very similar to what you might know as a Salisbury Steak.

There is a similar German dish still made in Germany today known as Frikadelle, which is sort of a meat cookie.

By the 18th century, Hamburg steak had become sufficiently established that it was recognized as a distinct regional specialty.

When Germans began emigrating to America in large numbers during the 19th century, they brought this culinary knowledge with them. However, they had to adapt their techniques to American ingredients, cooking methods, and cultural preferences.

The 1844 edition of the Boston Cooking School Cookbook references Hamburg steak.

By the mid-1800s, it appeared on American menus, often listed as “Hamburg-style beef” or “Hamburg steak.” These were typically served without bread, sometimes with gravy and onions, and aimed at German-American clientele.

The jump from hamburg steak to the hamburger is not clear, and there are many competing claims to the invention of the hamburger. What is clear is that the modern hamburger was developed in the United States, not in Hamburg, although Hamburg steak obviously played a role.

The first claim is that Louis Lassen, a Danish immigrant in New Haven, Connecticut, invented the hamburger. According to the Library of Congress, in 1900, Lassen served ground beef between two slices of bread at his small lunch wagon, Louis’ Lunch, to accommodate a hurried customer.

Claim number two is that Charlie Nagreen of Seymour, Wisconsin, is said to have flattened a meatball and served it between two slices of bread at a county fair in 1885 to make it easier to eat while walking. This story places the origin of the hamburger less than 20 miles from where I’m recording this episode.

The third claim holds that Frank and Charles Menches from Ohio allegedly sold a beef sandwich at the 1885 Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, and named it after the town.

The third claim is that Oscar Weber Bilby of Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly served the first true hamburger on a yeast bun in 1891, setting it apart from the sandwich-bread versions.

Another claim, and the earliest documented mention, came from a Texas newspaper in 1894. It said, “Hamburger steak sandwiches every day in the week at Barny’s Saloon, Moulton.”

We don’t know which of these claims is true, but the thing is, more than one of them, or even all of them, might be true. Putting a small Hamburg steak between bread isn’t rocket science, and it would be just one of many things which was invented independently in different places around the same time.

The hamburger’s popularity grew steadily in the early 20th century. By the 1920s, it had become a standard fare at fairs, diners, and lunch counters. It was inexpensive, satisfying, and relatively easy to prepare.

The hamburger bun deserves special attention because it’s actually a marvel of food engineering that most people take for granted. Early hamburgers were served between slices of regular bread, which created immediate problems: the bread would become soggy from meat juices, fall apart when handled, and didn’t provide the right texture.

The solution emerged gradually through the early 1900s. Bakers began creating specialized rolls that were sturdy enough to hold fillings without disintegrating, yet soft enough to bite through easily. The key innovations included using enriched dough with eggs and milk for tenderness, creating a slightly domed shape for better structural integrity, and developing the now-standard practice of slicing horizontally rather than vertically.

A major turning point came with the founding of White Castle in 1921 in Wichita, Kansas. White Castle was the first fast-food chain to standardize the hamburger, promote it as a clean and safe product, and emphasize efficiency in production. The restaurant sold small, square “sliders” for five cents, changing public perception of ground beef, which at the time had a questionable reputation.

White Castle and sliders are still around today. If you’ve never eaten at White Castle, the best way to describe a slider is the old adage that “quantity has a quality all its own”.

Cheese wasn’t part of the original hamburger concept, but its addition represents a fascinating example of American culinary innovation. The “cheeseburger” appears to have been invented in the 1920s or 1930s, with multiple claims from different establishments.

The choice of cheese was crucial. Early cheeseburgers used American cheese, which was actually perfect for this application, not because of its flavor, but because of its melting properties.

American cheese is a processed cheese product made from a blend of milk, milk fats, solids, and emulsifiers.

American cheese melts at a lower temperature than most natural cheeses and creates that smooth, creamy texture that adheres well to the meat patty. This wasn’t accidental; processed cheese was developed specifically to have consistent melting characteristics.

Ketchup and mustard weren’t originally hamburger condiments but were borrowed from other American food traditions. Ketchup’s sweetness and acidity complement the meat’s savory richness, while mustard’s sharpness provides flavor punctuation.

Mayonnaise entered hamburger culture later, often through regional variations. Its richness adds another layer of fat that some palates crave, and it serves as an excellent moisture barrier when spread on the bun.

The period after World War II was a perfect storm of social, economic, and technological changes that all converged to make hamburgers not just popular, but essential to how people lived their daily lives.

One of the reasons for the explosion in popularity in hamburgers was McDonald’s.

McDonald’s didn’t just serve hamburgers; they reimagined the entire process of hamburger preparation using assembly-line principles borrowed from manufacturing.

Each worker had a specific task, ingredients were pre-measured and standardized, and the cooking process was timed to the second. This wasn’t just efficiency for its own sake – it solved the fundamental problem of how to serve consistent, affordable food to large numbers of people quickly.

The story of McDonald’s will be its own future episode.

The franchise model that emerged from this systematization was key to the hamburger’s global expansion. Fanchising meant a successful hamburger operation could be replicated anywhere, with the same equipment, procedures, and even architectural design.

This allowed rapid expansion across the United States first, then internationally, because investors could buy into a proven system rather than having to develop their own restaurant concepts.

Soon, other chain hamburger restaurants exploded at both the regional and national levels, both in the United States and around the world.

In the course of my travels, I’ve had many hamburgers in many countries and many states.

You can find different variations on hamburgers in different places.

In Australia, you can find beetroot and fried eggs on burgers. The first time I ever had egg on a burger was in Australia, and I really liked it. The beetroot, not so much.

In Minneapolis, you can find some places that serve the Juicy Lucy, which are two patties with cheese between them that are crimped together. The cheese then melts inside, making it extremely hazardous to bite into.

My home state of Wisconsin is home to the butterburger, which is a burger with a big slab of butter on it.

There are many other variants, including the hula burger, the olive burger, the onion burger, and a host of others that I’m probably not even aware of.

In my travels, I’ve had some pretty awful hamburgers, which is surprising considering how easy they are to make.

One of the best places is actually in Japan. They have a burger chain known as MOS Burger, which stands for Mountain, Ocean, Sun. They really take hamburgers seriously and make a great burger.

From its late 19th- and early 20th-century origins, hamburgers have become globally ubiquitous. I don’t think there is a place I’ve ever visited, at least not in a city, where I couldn’t find a hamburger if I tried.

It all started with a minced meat steak from a busy port city in Germany.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Today’s review comes from listener search over on Spotify. They write:

I hope you’re happy now, Gary. Your relentless effort to educate us all has succeeded, and now I have no choice but to become a patron to feed my addiction to knowledge that only your episodes can satisfy.

Thanks, search! In the words of Hannibal Smith from the A-Team…….I love it when a plan comes together.

Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you, too, can have it read on the show.