Why did the Hamburger become the ultimate American meal?
Featuring actual people from Hamburg, cowboys, cars and corporations.
I’ve just arrived in the States, and like many immigrants before me, my first meal was a burger. The burger is iconically American, and it turns out that it’s history is too, despite beginning life outside of the US like so many people and things that now call America home.
I’ve learned a lot during the research process for this post and it’s taken me to some unexpected places - wars, German immigration and big infrastructure projects. I’ve been reminded that cowboys were actually cattle ranchers (not just movie stereotypes) and that Americans are some of the most innovative and entrepreneurial people in the world.
But I’ve also come up against some of the parts of America that I was most nervous about before moving here - big corporate America, hustle culture, the historical treatment of Native Indians and industrialised food processes. Trying to understand the history of the burger has thrown me in at the deep end and shown me that even a simple sounding dish can have a complex history. So, let’s tuck in.
How did a German regional dish become an American icon?
As with many great American dishes, the burger’s history starts outside of the States - this time in Germany. From 1820 to 1920, almost 5.5 million Germans immigrated to the United States. By 1900 many of the large cities in the Mid West such as Chicago, Cleveland and Cinninati were over 30% German. The majority of these new arrivals would have left through the port town of Hamburg (you might see where this is going) often waiting there for a space on a ship to become available. While in Hamburg, many of the immigrants would have been eating Frikadellen, a patty made from ground beef, sometimes mixed with breadcrumbs and served with potatoes, onions and gravy. The new arrivals brought the dish with them, and it started to appear on menus in New York and around the North East as Hamburg Steak.
Also during the late 1800s, the cattle and beef industry in America was massively expanding. The end of the Mexican-American war in 1848 and the Civil war in 1865 had created an environment that massively encouraged cattle farming. Huge areas of land had been expropriated from Mexico or American Indians in the south west, that thanks to the climate couldn’t be used for a whole lot else. The business model was appealing and huge amounts of investment flooded into the cattle ranching industry.
America’s railroads were also expanding during 1860s and 70s, allowing cattle to be transported in greater numbers over larger distances. As the slaughtering and processing was centralised in huge meat packing facilities in Chicago, more meat could make its way to the end consumer. Advances continued with refrigerated railway cars becoming more common towards the end of the 19th century. Beef prices fell and beef consumption per head rose dramatically.
By the turn of the century the cowboys in the Great Plains were seen as self-reliant and independently strong, holding the frontier of the wild west. Beef by association, developed a patriotic image.
But it’s not a burger without a bun
There’s some debate about exactly when and how beef patties were put into buns. Many establishments want to be the birth place of the burger and snap up the tourist revenue that comes with that claim to fame, but it seems like the idea cropped up in a few different places at about the same time.
The most commonly cited ‘first burger’ came from Louis’ Lunch in New Haven Connecticut, which started serving burgers in 1900. The story goes that a customer was in a hurry and asked for their lunch to be served quickly. The owner decided to give him his steak in between two slices of bread so he could walk out and eat on the go (sounds like a recipe for indigestion to me, but each to their own). In the last few years an earlier advert from 1894 was rediscovered for Barny’s Saloon in Moulton, Texas, promising “Hamburger Steak Sandwiches every day in the week”. It seems that while Louis may have come up with an innovative lunch in Connecticut, it was such a good idea that he was probably not the first to do it.
The final commonly touted theory is that food vendors trying to sell their beef patties from food carts, particularly at State Fairs, starting wrapping them in bread to make it easier for consumers to eat while standing up or walking away from their carts. This option doesn’t have a street food vendor still claiming to be the ‘first’ so doesn’t have anyone shouting loudly for it, but practically I think this was the most likely. It enabled the vendors to increase their turnover of customers by getting customers to move away from the stalls and therefore increasing profits, something that would be a continuing feature of the burger’s history.
What all of these stories have in common is the desire to eat quickly and on the go, an American trait that I still recognise (and still don’t understand) today. I’ve been amazed by how many people are eating sandwiches as they walk in New York, very different from the British ‘everyone sitting down for dinner together at the dining table’ culture that I grew up with. While I respect the ambition and drive behind eating on the go, if anyone ever spots me eating a burger while walking along please confiscate my British passport immediately, and only give it back when I sit down to eat at an actual table.
Beef’s cancellation and reinvention
But in the early 1900s, beef’s image suffered a big blow. In 1905 Upton Sinclair released a series of articles, later released as a book called ‘The Jungle’ which among many other things, documented what went on inside the new mega-meat packing factories in Chicago. Sinclair’s aim was to expose the terrible treatment of the poor in Chicago, many of whom worked in the slaughterhouses, but instead the book ended up causing a public outcry due to the unsanitary food handling conditions described. The resulting political reforms ultimately ended up with the establishment of the Food and Drug Administration (for non-US readers, this is the agency that still regulates all food and drug products sold in the United States).
Ground beef was particularly mistrusted after the scandal, partly because it’s always made from the lower quality cuts of meat and partly because of some particularly disgusting revelations included in Sinclair’s book about exactly what or who went through the grinders (that ultimately were never proven, but nevertheless left their mark on the consumers at the time). Given part of the problem was corporate greed, it’s surprising to me that a corporation started beef’s reinvention, but I guess I’m still learning about America.
A shiny new burger restaurant
In 1921, White Castle opened their first branch in Wichita, Kansas. It’s entire design philosophy was to emphasise how clean and safe their food was, and what better way to do that than with shiny, white castle shaped buildings. Inside the kitchens were open to the customer, showing off the staff’s clean white uniforms and the sparkling stainless steel counters.
White Castle made their burgers smaller and squarer than what had come before to be able to pack more burgers onto the grill and cook them quickly, greatly increasing the rate of production. The model proved so profitable that White Castle rapidly expanded, opening new branches and centralised production facilities to bake buns exactly to their specifications, ensuring that the same product was sold in each location. The fast food chain was born.
Driving growth
The next big moment in the burger’s history comes after the end of World War 2, when machinery previously used to support the war effort could now return to producing cars. People started driving more than ever before, thanks to increasing levels of disposable income and the development of the Interstates (which before researching this article I had no idea were spearheaded by Eisenhower’s government after WW2 to help the economy and create jobs). And given how fun driving was, particularly in the shiny and futuristic cars of the 50s, people didn’t want to get out of their cars when it was time to eat.
Drive-in restaurants started springing up, where servers delivered orders directly to customers in their cars. It turns out that the burger was the perfect food to be eaten in a car - quick, often only needing one hand to eat and (depending on the burger) with limited mess. Southern California became the epicentre of fast-food car culture, with In-N-Out opening the first drive-thru in 1948, McDonald’s opening their first restaurant the same year. The burger was a winner on all fronts - good for the customer and profitable for the restaurant, cementing its status as a favourite food for much of America.
Modern burgers
Fast forward 70-odd years and you can find a burger almost everywhere. Franchising made it possible for fast-food chains to explode and McDonald’s now has over 41,000 locations worldwide across at least 100 countries.
But the burger isn’t just fast-food any more, as by 2015 43% of restaurants in America had at least one burger on their menu according to research company Food Genius. And when I was travelling through the Scottish Highlands and rural Brittany by sailboat, I probably ate more burgers than anything else as they were reliably on pretty much every menu I came across, even outside of the US.
There’s also been innovation on the original format - unique toppings are being added and people are getting increasingly passionate about regional burgers. Some definitely sound worth a try, like the Oklahoma onion burger where onions are fried in with the smash patty, but others like Pennsylvania’s Fluff Screamer (topped with marshmallow fluff) I will steer well clear of thank you very much.
Burger history 🤝 US history
Learning about the burger has taught me more than I could ever have expected about American history and brought me face to face with some classic American stereotypes. The fact that Americans love their cars and driving through things was not news to me (once on a family holiday to California we visited a drive-through redwood tree), but I wasn’t expecting the burger to teach me about how this started or to help me understand why it’s so popular.
I suspected that beef’s story might have had some twists, but I was not expecting there to be so much to unpack. I could have written much more extensively about the cattle industry’s history and the ethical considerations all wrapped up with it, but given how long this post has already turned out I’ll save that for its own post. As well as the environmental impact, I was not expecting to be reading about beef’s role in American Indian history so soon. This is a subject that I am by no means qualified to discuss while I’m so fresh off the plane from London, but one I’m very keen to learn more about in the future.
But the biggest surprise for me came when watching YouTube videos of burger enthusiasts talking about what should be in the ‘perfect burger’. It was very similar to how I’ve heard Italians talk about what should be in their classic pasta dishes. The way some modern burger chefs approach their craft, with a few simple ingredients, cooked without complication to create something delicious is an approach to food and cooking wouldn’t be out of place in the south of France (although without the processed cheese). Maybe the burger still does display its European origins more than I expected.
The Extra Patty
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for sticking with me! I’d normally include a recipe or restaurant suggestions here, but given how much I’ve already made you read in one sitting I’ll be back in a few days for round 2. See you soon!