The many faces of the mighty burger
Ron Hosner, better known as Hoz, can do a pretty amazing job of recalling his first hamburger. He was six, maybe seven. It was at his mother’s restaurant in Benton Harbor, Michigan, just around the lake from Chicago. The name of the place, The Melody Grill, is as beguiling as the image, locked inside a 1950s time warp.
"It was a cheeseburger deluxe with olives, that’s what I remember," says Hoz, owner and captain of Hoz’s Pub as well as El Tipo’s next door. "When I was a kid all burgers came with mustard, ketchup, pickle and onion. If you had a deluxe, it came with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato and onion. It was five cents extra for olives."
Back east, you order a burger with the distinctive touch of sliced green olives and it’s called an "ollie" (at Hoz’s it’s a Hoz burger). In England, olives or no, they’re called wimpeys for Popeye’s roly-poly pal who orders them by the dozen. Whatever they’re called and wherever they’re served, hands down, the hamburger is king of fast food – and, like it or not, a cultural emissary of the American way.
The mighty hamburger is nothing if not mythic, and that may be why its exact origins are tough to pin down. You also have to sort through whether the various sources are referring to hamburger, as in ground beef, or the full meal deal with bun.
Hamburg, New York claims to be home of the first hamburger, but as far as the historical records go, it seems that an eatery there only served beef, unground, on a bun when they ran out of pork. The most popular legend, though that doesn’t necessarily mean the most accurate one, claims that hamburger – as in, ground meat sans bun – first churned out of a meat grinder in Hamburg, Germany in the 1800s. It’s a tidy little tale, but attributing the provenance of hamburgers solely to Hamburg is as thin as hot mustard spread on a bun.
In The Complete Hamburger , Ronald J. McDonald (come on, who really wrote this book? RJM disavows any relationship to the mascot, or the famous chain’s founders, though I bet he wishes he was) traces the roots of hamburger back to the Mongols in Asia, who relished ground meat patties of a certain style.
Under the leadership of that famous warrior Temujin, better known as Genghis Khan, the Mongols conquered much of what is now Asia and Europe in the 13th century. Their nomadic lifestyle gave rise to distinctive portable tent-like homes called yurts, and equally distinctive portable food that could be carried on horseback and easily eaten. To tenderize lamb or horse meat patties, the Mongols wrapped them in skins – not buns – and placed them under their saddles as they rode. Then they ate them – raw.
When Genghis Khan’s descendent, Kubla Khan, invaded Moscow the Russians adopted the culinary concept, calling it steak tartare (Tartar translates to "Mongol"). Over time, they added their own culinary touches like raw egg and chopped onion.
Steak tartare eventually followed trade routes into the city-state of Hamburg, Germany, which, if not the original source, is at least the place that popularized this particular dish in Europe, eventually lending its name to hamburger. There cooks pushed along steak tartare’s evolution. In the spirit of competition, they added salt, pepper, pickles and even small sardines to give their ground meat a leg up in flavour; one even tried cooking the patties.
The Hamburgian idea of hamburger was brought to North America by immigrants – grinding tougher, cheaper cuts of meat was ideal for life on a tight budget. But the whole concept was pretty similar to ground meat long prepared by many First Nations people. Buffalo and venison had been scraped from bones and skin and cooked on flat rocks in the middle of a fire for eons. Ergo hamburger is even more home-grown than we might think.
In 1896, hamburger beefsteak, which was usually cooked in large oval patties and served with gravy and mashed potatoes, received its first official culinary recognition by being included in Fanny Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book .
But it wasn’t till 1904 that Fletcher Davis (called "Old Dave" by his pals), a fry cook working a local diner in Athens, Texas, thought of making hamburger into a sandwich. He surrounded the patty with Texas toast – thick white bread with a crisp crust – added a slice of raw onion, and what we might call the first REAL hamburger was born. Old Dave took his taste sensation to the St. Louis World’s Fair where the midway crowds fell in love with it.
In 1916, another restaurant operator, Walter Anderson, who later became co-founder of that other all-American institute, the White Castle restaurant chain, substituted a bun for the soggy bread and the burger got another lift. White Castle also originated the concept of the small, affordable burger – they sold for a nickel. Walter’s partner in White Castle later pioneered the ubiquitous frozen, portion-controlled meat patties.
But it took the McDonald brothers, Richard and Maurice, to transform hamburgers into gold. Sons of Irish immigrants, Richard and Mac settled in Hollywood in 1928. After trying to strike it rich with a movie theatre and a hot dog stand, they opened their McDonald’s Brothers Burger Bar Drive-In in 1940 in a renovated building in San Bernardino. Did they ever guess what they were starting?
The golden arches of McDonald’s have risen in more than 30,000 locations that serve more than 47 million people every day in 119 countries. They stopped counting the exact number served billions ago – I think it was the week last November when the local McDonald's was selling hamburgers for 10 cents each and people were buying them by the gazillions. I bet a few are still floating around freezers, solid as hockey pucks.
So what makes the perfect hamburger?
Hoz says it’s got to be 100 per cent real beef (no organs or fillers, please) and char-grilled. His favourite is topped with mayo, tomatoes, red onion and slices of real fresh cheddar cheese – and those thinly sliced green olives. These days he skips the bun.
Over at Splitz Grill, their burgers have been voted No. 1 for good reason by Pique readers ever since Trevor Jackson and his wife Miriam opened the grill in 1997. Here "freshness" and "home-made" are the bywords. Even the patties are shaped by hand every morning. Once your boiger is off the grill, you get to hand-pick your own fixin’s just the way you like it – isn’t that at least half the pleasure of a great burger?
So how does Trevor like his? With Splitz sauce (a garlicky mayonnaise), kosher dill pickles – they’re the best, nice and sour and garlicky – thinly sliced sweet red onions, crispy lettuce, honey mustard, hot banana peppers, cheese and bacon.
Now if that doesn’t get your mouth watering, I don’t know what will. And that’s my measure of the perfect burger. It literally gets your salivary glands in gear, and, if you get the angle just right, those gorgeous burger juices will ooze out the sides and drip from your wrists before they hit your lap or shirt-front.
Chew on these tid-bits…
• The world’s biggest burger was cooked at the Ootagamie County Fair at Seymour, Wisconsin in 1989. It weighed 5,520 pounds and measured 21 feet in diameter. Holy cow.
• The beef from Kobe Japan likely makes what is the world’s most expensive ground beef – it retails at about $45 a pound.
• A small resort hotel in Bhutan, located in the heart of the Himalayan Mountains, serves steak tartare made from mountain goat. Australia offers its own burger-type dish made from kangaroo; the Honduras does likewise with tapir.
