Hamburger

• 1. Introduction

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  The hamburger is one of those foods that seems to have always existed, yet nobody can agree on who made the first one. On the 5th of July, 1896, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a remarkably specific account of a "Sandwich Car" selling five-cent hamburger steak sandwiches, with the meat kept ready in small patties and "cooked while you wait" on a gasoline range. That single sentence may be the most vivid early snapshot of a food that would go on to become a global icon of American culture. But by 1896, the hamburger was already a contested thing. Multiple inventors, multiple cities, multiple decades all claimed the prize. Who actually made the first one? Where did the name really come from? And how did a disputed sandwich from Hamburg, Germany or Hamburg, New York or Athens, Texas end up reshaping how billions of people eat?

• 2. A Name Without a Clear Origin

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  Hamburg, Germany lends its name to the hamburger, but what exactly that connection means has never been settled. One theory points to Hamburg steak, a preparation served aboard Hamburg America Line ships beginning operations in 1847, eaten by passengers traveling from Hamburg to New York. The idea is that Jewish passengers on those crossings became so associated with the dish that the shipping company eventually gave its name to it. Another trail leads to a recipe in the 1758 edition of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which includes a "Hamburgh sausage" meant to be served on toasted bread. A third story traces the food to a street snack called "Rundstuck warm," meaning "bread roll warm," popular in Hamburg by 1869, carried by emigrants heading to America.

  By linguistic rebracketing, the word "burger" eventually detached from its German-city roots and became a standalone term. Today it covers turkey burgers, salmon burgers, veggie burgers, bison burgers, and portobello burgers. None of those have any connection to Hamburg. White Castle, the early American hamburger chain, traces the dish not to any ship or cookbook but to a man named Otto Krause, who in 1891 cooked a beef patty in butter and topped it with a fried egg. German sailors later dropped the egg. That the chain felt compelled to name a specific inventor at all speaks to how much the origin question has always mattered to the people selling hamburgers.

• 3. The Rival Claimants

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  Charlie Nagreen was 15 years old when he reportedly sold pork sandwiches at the 1885 Seymour Fair in Wisconsin, flattening them so customers could eat while walking. The Seymour Community Historical Society credits Nagreen, nicknamed "Hamburger Charlie," with inventing the dish, saying he named it after the Hamburg steak familiar to local German immigrants. At the same year's Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, brothers Frank and Charles Menches ran out of pork sausage and substituted ground beef purchased from a butcher. The Menches brothers say the name came from Hamburg, New York, not Germany. A historian named Joseph Streamer later disputed even the name of the butcher they bought the meat from.

  Fletcher Davis of Athens, Texas, offered a different account. He said he opened a lunch counter in Athens in the 1880s, serving fried ground beef patties with mustard and Bermuda onion between two slices of bread, with a pickle on the side. In 1904, Davis and his wife Ciddy ran a stand at the St. Louis World's Fair, and a photograph of "Old Dave's Hamburger Stand" from that year was sent to historian Frank X. Tolbert as evidence. It was at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair that hamburgers gained national recognition in the United States; the New York Tribune described the hamburger there as "the innovation of a food vendor on the pike."

  Louis Lassen's story sits on a different timeline entirely. His restaurant Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Connecticut, founded in 1895, claims to be the birthplace of the hamburger sandwich. Around 1900, Lassen, a Danish immigrant, improvised a patty from ground beef trimmings when he ran out of steaks for a quick customer order and served it between two slices of toast. An ABC News summary noted that the dispute may never be resolved partly because "there is little written history" and it is entirely possible that more than one person came up with the idea simultaneously in different parts of the country.

• 4. Building the Industry

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  White Castle opened in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921, and its founders faced a specific challenge: ground beef had been discredited in the public mind by books from Upton Sinclair and Arthur Kallet questioning its cleanliness and nutritional value. White Castle's response was to prepare food in full view of customers, conduct scientific studies, publish reports in local newspapers about their meat sourcing, and open what they called a "Food Experiment Department" as a test kitchen and quality-control lab. They sold small square hamburgers known as sliders, each with five holes punched into the patty to help it cook evenly without flipping. In 1995, they expanded into convenience stores and vending machines with frozen hamburgers.

  Kewpee Hamburgers, founded in Flint, Michigan, in 1923, became the second established hamburger chain and peaked at 400 locations before World War II. Licensing arrangements rather than strict franchising characterized much of their growth, and many locations closed during the war. As of 2025, only five Kewpee locations remain.

  In 1937, Bob Wian created the double-decker hamburger at his Glendale, California stand, naming both the sandwich and eventually the restaurant Big Boy. The chain spread nationally through regional franchising, operating primarily as drive-ins in the 1950s before interior dining replaced curb service by the early 1970s.

  McDonald's opened in San Bernardino, California, in 1940. Richard and Maurice McDonald introduced what they called the "Speedee Service System" in 1948, establishing principles that would define the modern fast-food model. They began franchising in 1953. In 1961, Ray Kroc, who had been supplying their milkshake machines, purchased the company from the brothers for $2.7 million and a 1.9% royalty.

• 5. The Global Burger

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  In France, a 2013 study by Gira Conseil found that 75% of traditional French restaurants offered at least one hamburger on their menu, and for a third of those restaurants, it had become their top-selling dish, surpassing rib steaks, grills, and fish. A 2012 study by the NDP cabinet placed the French fourth in the world for per-person restaurant hamburger consumption, at 14 per year, and second in Europe behind the British.

  In Denmark, the hamburger arrived in 1949 under the name bøfsandwich. The original recipe used a mix of beef and horse meat with mustard, ketchup, and soft onions. The original bøfsandwich is still served at the same restaurant where it debuted in 1949, now run by the original owner's grandson. Copenhagen's burger culture eventually grew refined enough to include Popl, an offshoot of Noma.

  In India, where religious dietary practice means that most fast-food chains serve no beef, McDonald's offers the "Maharaja Mac" with chicken patties substituting for beef. The vada pav, a deep-fried potato patty in gram flour batter, is sometimes called the Bombay burger. In China, McDonald's and KFC's branding has made the word for burger, pronounced as the characters for "han bao," the standard Mandarin term for any sandwich with buns and a meat patty. Chinese media have pointed to roujiamo, a pork sandwich with documented origins in the Qin dynasty from 221-206 BC, as evidence that China invented the hamburger first.

  Japan developed its own parallel burger culture. Hamburg steaks served without buns, similar to American Salisbury steaks, became a mainstream restaurant item. Homegrown chains including MOS Burger, First Kitchen, and Freshness Burger competed with international brands. In 2021, McDonald's Japan launched a McPork burger made with American pork. Japan's luxury end of the burger market produced the 1,000-yen "Takumi Burger" featuring freshly grated wasabi, avocado, and seasonal ingredients, and burgers made with Kobe beef from cows fed beer and massaged daily.

• 6. Variations and Records

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  The veggie burger has a longer history than its current prominence might suggest. John Harvey Kellogg developed a peanut-based meat substitute he called Nuttose in the 1890s. Soy-based burgers appeared from companies including Loma Linda, Boca Burger, and Lightlife in the 1960s and 1970s. Gardein, Impossible Foods, and Beyond Meat entered the market in the 2000s with products built primarily from peas, soy, mushrooms, yeast, beans, or nuts.

  Minnesota contributed the Juicy Lucy, a hamburger with cheese sealed inside the raw meat before cooking, resulting in a molten core. Servers typically warn customers to let it cool before biting. Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest claim the butter burger, a standard patty with a pad of butter on top or a heavily buttered bun, made famous by the Culver's chain. In Alberta, Canada, a kubie burger swaps the beef patty for pressed Ukrainian sausage (kubasa). The ramen burger, invented by Keizo Shimamoto, uses two compressed ramen noodle discs in place of a bun.

  At the expensive end of the spectrum, Serendipity 3 held a Guinness World Record in May 2012 for the world's most expensive hamburger: the $295 Le Burger Extravagant. Mallie's Sports Grill and Bar in Southgate, Michigan, sells the 185.8-pound "Absolutely Ridiculous Burger" at $499, requiring about 12 hours to prepare; it was first cooked and adjudicated on the 30th of May, 2009. On the 5th of August, 2013, the first hamburger grown from cow cells outside a living animal was served. It came from a $300,000 research project led by Mark Post at Maastricht University, sponsored by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

• 7. Price, Safety, and the Big Mac Index

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  The McDonald's Big Mac sells an estimated 550 million units annually in the United States alone. According to Bloomberg News, the average price of a fast-food burger in the United States rose by 16% between 2019 and 2024, reaching $8.41 in the second quarter of 2024. The Big Mac specifically cost $5.29 in that same period, a 21% increase over five years.

  The Economist turned that price into a tool. Its Big Mac Index uses the cost of a Big Mac in different countries as a simple way to compare purchasing power across currencies, on the logic that the sandwich is standardized enough globally to serve as a rough benchmark.

  Raw hamburger meat can carry Escherichia coli O157:H7 and other bacteria capable of causing food-borne illness. The USDA recommends cooking hamburgers to an internal temperature of 160 degrees Fahrenheit, at which point they are considered well-done. Most conventional restaurants will serve a burger cooked to order as low as rare, but fast-food chains generally do not offer that option. The term "steak burger" in the United States dates back to the 1920s and was formalized in 1934 by A.H. "Gus" Belt, founder of Steak 'n Shake, at the company's first location in Normal, Illinois. In 2004, Steak 'n Shake sued Burger King over its use of the term Steak Burger, claiming trademark infringement; the case was settled out of court.