The invention of hamburger

The hamburger is the dish of the moment. They’ve moved on from being the ideal fast food to feature on numerous restaurant menus and have become a gourmet item. The choices on offer get better all the time.

The story of hamburger begins in October 1885, near the small town of Seymour, Wisconsin. Charlie Nagreen was said to have been only 15 years old on August 5, 1885, when he first began frying his hamburger patties in butter and selling them from an ox-drawn cart at the county fair.

Charlie was going to Outagamie County’s first annual; fair, where he wanted to earn some extra money selling meatballs. The meatball was easy to assemble and the young lad knew people would be hungry after walking around viewing the agricultural exhibits at the fair. As Charlie sold meatballs at the fair, he noticed that customers had trouble eating and strolling at the same time.

People were impatient. They wanted to visit Mr. John Bull’s popular beehives (encased in glass), to see the fancy new harvesting machines and to enjoy all the other thrilling attractions at the fair.

They didn’t want to waste time eating meatballs. Charlie suddenly had an idea, if he squashed the meatballs and put them between two slices of bread, people could walk and eat. And so Charlie invented the hamburger.

German immigrants lived in Charlie’s hometown of Hortonville, Wisconsin and he later claimed that the new sandwich was named the German of Hamburg long famous for its ground beef steaks. Charlie continued selling burgers at the Outagamie Country Fair until 1951.

Charlie had not only invented the hamburger but also composed one of the first advertising jingles for it. He continued to sell his creation at the county fair for the next 65 years.

The invention of hamburger 

Early history of hamburger: a food for the poor

Many people assumed that ground beef was dirty and during the early 1900s the hamburger was considered “a food of the poor,” polluted and unsafe to eat.

Restaurants rarely served hamburgers; they were served at lunch carts parked near factories, at circuses carnivals and state fairs. It was widely believed that ground beef was made from rotten old meat full of chemical preservatives. Dishonest butchers sold ground beef that was really a mixture of spoiled meat, fat scraps, and animal parts that no one would choose to eat. To most Americans, ground beef was an unsafe food.

Not only was considered “food for the poor” but it also had a rather dubious reputation; the burger was associated with criminal activity. In 191o, Alexander J. Moody, a wealthy baker from Chicago, died after somebody put poison in his burger. One year later, a Chicago pie maker was poisoned the same way. Similar murder stories appeared in newspapers across the United States. The police were never able to solve the case.

The widespread fear of hamburgers caused a great deal of frustration among butches. They liked to grind leftover pieces of beef not hamburger meat. They liked selling every scrap of meat in the store. They didn’t want to waste any of it.

Hamburger sandwiches might have remained a lower-class food with a bad reputation had it not been for J. Walter Anderson, a short order cook in Wichita, Kansas, in 1916 Anderson had saved enough money to purchase an old shoe repair building and converted it into a hamburger for nickel.

He arranged for beef to be delivered twice a day, and sometimes more often and he ground his own beef so that customer could watch him do so through glass windows.
Early history of hamburger: a food for the poor

Cucumber pickle

The cucumber, Cucumis sativus is a subtropical annual originating in India. Domesticated by the seventh century BC the cucumber soon spread to China and the ancient Mediterranean world.

In very general sense, pickles refer to any vegetables or fruit that is preserved by salt or acid. Certainly, the vegetable most often associated with pickles is the cucumber. The cucumber pickle has been a popular item in the American diet.

Less than half of the pickles consumed in the United States undergo lactic acid fermentation. Rather acetic acid can be added directly as the pickling acid, omitting the fermentation step.

The pickle slice on top of a fast food hamburger is probably not a fermented type. Billions of hamburgers are sold every year by fast food franchises and they contain a slice of a pickle inside.

Canned pickles are subsequently pasteurized which eliminates oxygen by creating a vacuum inside the jar. This prevents molds and yeasts from growing. It also destroys tissue softening enzymes which create soft pickles.

For the best result, pickle cucumbers within 24 hours after harvesting.
Cucumber pickle

Hamburger Restaurant: White Castle

During the 1920s, several decades before the rise of McDonald’s and Burger King, White Castle heralded the advent of fast-food burger chains. In 1921 Walter Anderson and Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram opened a hamburger restaurant in Wichita, Kansas under the name of White Castle.

In creating his White Castle restaurants, Ingram countered negative stereotypes by grinding choice cuts of fresh beef directly in front of his customers, constructing his buildings out no gleaning stainless steel and white enamel, an adopting a crenellated roof design that resemble a castle.

The founders successfully popularized the hamburger sandwich; created a uniform company standard of architecture, menu and quality among its many out lets; an introduced customers to a carryout style of eating.

Many of White Castle’s culinary and corporate innovations would later become fundamental to both the American diet and modern business operations.

Into the 21st century many patrons prefer White Castle because of it is friendly, familiar, an exudes a sense of nostalgia. In regions where they exist, these local restaurants are often treasured - even after the arrival of newer, flashier and bigger rivals.  
Hamburger Restaurant: White Castle