Origins of the Hamburger

One popular story goes that in 1900 a customer walked into Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Conn., and asked for something he could eat on the go. Owner Louis Lassen improvised by giving him a patty of the restaurant’s steak trimmings between two pieces of toast. The customer got his carryout lunch, and the world got the hamburger sandwich.

The story has been repeated many times by Connecticut and national publications, but I have recently found proof it is not true.

Lassen may well have conceived of his sandwich on the spur of the moment, but at that point many US businesses were serving hamburgers.

.This early burger reference inspired me to dig deeper, and I have since found more than a dozen newspaper references to hamburgers in the 1890s, including in Virginia, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, California and Hawaii. These findings debunk the Louis’ Lunch claim and suggest other burger origin stories are not true, either. In Wisconsin, many claim the burger was invented by Charlie Nagreen, who purportedly sold a meatball between two slices of bread at an 1885 fair in Seymour. In Athens, Tex., the title of “hamburger creator” is bestowed upon Fletcher Davis, who supposedly came up with it in the 1880s. Other burger origin stories can be found in New York, Oklahoma and elsewhere, but they lack documentation.

It turns out chopped meat served between or inside bread is nearly as ancient as civilization.

“A first-century A.D. Roman cookbook by Apicius has a recipe in it that is suspiciously close to the modern burger, a minced meat patty blended with crushed nuts and heavily spiced and cooked,” says George Motz, a filmmaker and author who has researched burger history extensively.

In the mid-1700s, “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy” by Hannah Glasse carried a “Hamburgh sausages” recipe, which was served on toasted bread. In Germany, a meat patty on bread called Rundstück Warm was popular by at least 1869.

But the true precursor to the burger we know today seems to be an inexpensive dish called hamburger steak, which began appearing on American menus in the early 1870s. (A menu, allegedly from Delmonico’s in New York City in 1834, listed the dish. It was eventually exposed as a fake.)

These minced beef and onion patties were served on a plate, not bread, and took their name from choice cows raised in the countryside around Hamburg that supposedly provided the beef. Originally, the meat was minced by hand, but as meat grinders became more available in the late 1800s, so did hamburger steaks. By the 1880s, hamburger steaks were available at restaurants across the country. Often these steaks were served in locations that also served bread and sandwiches.

Given the frequent proximity of hamburger steak and bread — buns came later — combining these foods doesn’t seem like the work of a culinary genius. Instead, it appears to be a natural evolution. By the late 1880s, hamburger steaks were popular across the United States. In 1887 a New York lodging house advertised “a bowl of coffee, hamburger steak and bread” for 10 cents. A few years later, in 1891, the Boston Globe carried an ad for a butcher shop selling a cookbook with a recipe for “hamburger on toast.”

A blurb in the July 25, 1893 edition of the Reno Gazette-Journal in Reno, Nev., announced that Tom Fraker had taken over the lunch counter at a local saloon, noting “Tom prides himself on his ability to make hamburger sandwiches.”

Washington Post