History of the hamburger
[13] This global culinary culture has been produced, in part, by the concept of selling processed food, first launched in the 1920s by the White Castle restaurant chain and its founder Edgar Waldo "Billy" Ingram and then refined by McDonald's in the 1940s [14][15] This global expansion provides economic points of comparison like the Big Mac Index,[16] by which one can compare the purchasing power of different countries where the Big Mac hamburger is sold.
Hamburgh Sausage is made with minced meat and a variety of spices, including nutmeg, cloves, black pepper, garlic, and salt, and is typically served with toast.
Early American preparations of minced beef were therefore made to fit the tastes of European immigrants, evoking memories of the port of Hamburg and the world they left behind.
By the late 19th century, an increasing amount of land was being devoted to cattle and a growing number of people being employed as cowboys, resulting in the United States becoming one of the world's largest producers and consumers of beef.
[24] In 1933, Arthur Kallett published a similar book, entitled 100 million guinea pigs; Dangers in Everyday foods, drugs, and cosmetics, which warned consumers specifically about the content preservatives in hamburgers.
Despite varieties, common elements in these narratives include the claim that the hamburger was born as a food associated with major events such as amusement parks, fairs, conferences, and festivals.
Another alleged inventor of the hamburger is the cook Fletcher Davis (better known as "Old Dave"), who claimed to have had the idea of putting ground beef between two pieces of Texas Toast when one of his customers was in too much of a hurry to sit down for a meal.
Texan journalist Frank X. Tolbert mentions a salesman named Fletcher Davis who served hamburgers in a café at 115 Tyler Street in Athens during the late 1880s.
In 1974, in an interview with The New York Times, he recounted how he created a hamburger steak sandwich with small strips of beef for a restaurant known as Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut.
[45] Hamburg steak, once served between two slices of bread, began to be prepared with a variety of different ingredients that were included either in the sandwich itself or as a side dish accompanying it on a plate.
One of these accompaniments, which is still common with today's burger, is ketchup, a type of tomato sauce with a blend of flavors between sweet and sour that was first produced commercially in 1869 by entrepreneur and chef Henry John Heinz in Sharpsburg, Pennsylvania.
[49] Another ingredient incorporated into the burger, mayonnaise, appears to have been present in 18th century France, after the naval victory of Louis-François-Armand du Plessis de Richelieu in the port of Mahón in Menorca around 1756.
[52] French fries were introduced as a snack in American cafés by the early 20th century,[53]: 109–112 but they did not become popular until World War II-era rationing made them an inexpensive and easily available menu item.
For example, German immigrant Charles Feltman invented the hot dog in 1867 in his stall in Coney Island, New York by pairing a frankfurter with a bread bun.
Ingram soon realized that the word burger evoked connotations of circus performances at livestock markets and greasy pieces of meat eaten in the poorest districts of the city in the collective mind of the American public.
In 1932, White Castle created its first subsidiary: Paperlynen Company, which provided the cartons and wrapping paper that the food was served in, as well as the hats worn by the kitchen staff.
In 1947, an employee named Earl Howell calculated the amount of time that it took to break hamburgers apart in a presentable fashion, eventually leading him to create the perforated burger.
One of these imitators also had a highly similar name, White Tower Hamburgers of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, founded by the father and son tandem of John E. and Thomas E. Saxe.
[56] In 1937, Patrick McDonald and his two sons Richard and Maurice inaugurated the simple restaurant "Airdrome" on Huntington Drive (Route 66) near the airport in the American city of Monrovia, California.
[15][62] During the 1940s, simple and formative concepts took root at McDonald's, including the preparation and service of burgers in just one minute and the ability for customers to eat in their own cars in a drive-in style.
They looked at different options that could increase the speed of cooking hamburgers, designing and patenting special grills that had a higher output, made their cutlery and other kitchen utensils disposable, and introduced dishwashers that reduced the costs of water, soap, and labor.
[10] Luis Ballast, owner of the Humpty Dumpty drive-in restaurant in Denver, Colorado, made an attempt to create a cheeseburger with a registered trademark known as a "yellowburger" in 1935.
By 1959, Burger King already had five restaurants in metropolitan Miami, and its early success prompted McLamore and Edgerton to expand throughout the United States by using a franchise system that allowed them to grow the business at a relatively low cost.
The modern hamburger was developed in the United States, but by the end of World War II, around the middle of the 20th century, it began to spread to other countries as fast food became globalized.
In Asia, Japan saw the establishment of its own fast food chain in 1972: MOS Burger (モスバーガー, Mosu bāgā), an abbreviation of "Mountain, Ocean, Sun", which eventually became a direct competitor to McDonald's.
One of the first such burgers was cooked in New York City by chef Daniel Boulud in June 2001, and subsequently sold for US$29 with loin, ribs Bres, canned black truffles, and a mirepoix of vegetables.
[10] An haute cuisine burger created by Richard Blais, a student of Ferran Adrià, was introduced in 2004 at a restaurant in Atlanta, where it is served with a crystal chain and a silk ribbon.
In a 2005 episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, the adventurous title character visits Mr. Krabs's popular Krabby Patty burgers, where hamburgers figure prominently in the story.
In an era in which a growing amount of the world's population has become either overweight or more conscious of weight and the need for a healthy diet in general, the appearance of exceptionally larger burgers (popularly known as "XXL hamburgers") has generated considerable controversy.
Two years later, in 2006, the film Fast Food Nation presented a fictional representation of the intrigues and machinations of the meat industry on the border between Mexico and the United States.
