Made In America - Bill Bryson [129]
All of these, however, paled in comparison with a dietary behemoth that emerged from the shadows in the 1920s and took its place at the top of the table. I refer of course to the hamburger.
No one knows where the first hamburger was made. The presumption has always been that it came to America from Hamburg, Germany, in the same way that the frankfurter came from Frankfurt and that baloney hailed from Bologna. However, this overlooks the niggling consideration that Hamburg has never had any tradition of serving such a dish. Given its central role in the American diet, the evidence as to when the hamburger first appeared and why it was so called is vexingly uncertain, though there is no shortage of claimants for the title. Among the more insistent, if not necessarily most likely, contenders have been the towns of Seymour, Wisconsin, and Hamburg, New York, both of which claim to have been the birthplace of the hamburger in 1885. Seymour attributes the invention to one Charles Nagreen and unequivocally advertises itself as the ‘Home of the Hamburger’, though its supporters tend to grow quiet when asked to explain on what basis Nagreen chose to commemorate a distant German city. More plausible, on the face of it, would appear to be the claim of Hamburg, New York, whose proponents believe that it was the inspired creation of the brothers Frank and Charles Menches, who developed it at the Erie County Fair in 1885.
Unfortunately for both claims, the etymological evidence suggests an earlier birth for the name, if not the dish. There is some evidence to suggest that it may have appeared as ‘Hamburg steak’ on a Delmonico’s menu as early as 1836 or 1837. The first undisputed sighting has been traced to the Boston Journal of 16 February 1884, which wrote in passing, ‘We take a chicken and boil it. When it is cold we cut it up as they do meat to make a Hamburg steak.’ As so often happens with first citations, the context makes it clear that by this time the dish was already well known. Unfortunately, it also indicates that it was a different dish from the one we know today, involving as it did beef cut up rather than ground, and eaten cold. What is certain is that the Hamburg steak was widely called hamburger steak by 1889 (the first reference was in a newspaper in Walla Walla, Washington, suggesting that by this time it was eaten nationwide). That term in turn was being shortened to hamburger by 1901, by which time it had come to signify a patty of ground beef fried on a grill.
But it was still not a sandwich. It was, rather, a lump of ground beef served bare and eaten with a knife and fork. Who first had the idea of serving it in a bun is unknown and essentially unprovable, though once again there is no shortage of claimants. One such is Louis’ Lunch of New Haven, Connecticut, which claims to have invented the true article in 1900, though some purists dismiss Louis’ on the grounds that it served its burgers (indeed still does) on toasted bread rather than buns. Kaelin’s Restaurant in Louisville, meanwhile, claims to have concocted and named the first cheeseburger in 1934, and I have no doubt that there are many other places around the country making similar heartfelt assertions. At all events, we can safely say that by about 1910 the object that we now know and venerate as the hamburger was widely consumed and universally known by that name. In its early years the hamburger was often regarded by short-order cooks as a convenient way of passing off old or doubtful meat, and by its consumers, in consequence, as an item to be approached with caution. Not until 1921, with the rise of two entrepreneurs in Wichita, Kansas, did the hamburger begin to take its first vigorous strides towards respectability. The men in question were a former insurance executive named E. W. ‘Billy’ Ingram and a short-order cook named Walter A. Anderson, and their brilliant stroke was to offer the world decent hamburgers using