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SYSK TRENDING - Where Did the Hamburger Come From?
00:23:25
The surprising true story of the hamburger—how it was really invented and became America's favorite sandwich.
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- [00:04]
A
We are in the middle of summer, and almost everywhere hamburgers are being cooked on the grill. The hamburger is one of the world's most recognizable foods, but despite its name, it probably didn't come from where most people think. And its origin story is a lot more complicated than a simple trip from Germany to America. That's why today's Sysk trending topic is where did the hamburger come from? So was the hamburger. Was a hamburger created by an ambitious cook? A clever entrepreneur? Or did it evolve over time from several different ideas? Today we're digging into the surprising history behind this iconic sandwich with author and historian Chris Carossa. He has spent years investigating the evidence separating fact from legend and uncovering the fascinating story of how the hamburger became an American icon. That's coming up right after this. One thing I love about summer is how simple getting dressed becomes. And I've noticed something kind of funny. When I'm getting ready in the morning, I keep looking for the same shirt. Not because I plan to wear it, it's just the one I want. For me, that's my Quince linen shirt. It's light, it's breathable, it looks good without trying too hard. And somehow it works, whether I'm meeting someone for lunch or just running errands. That's when you know you've bought something good, when you stop thinking about it and you just reach for it. I have several Quince pieces now and they're all like that. Their T shirts are incredibly soft. The linen is perfect for the summer heat. And when the evening cools off, their lightweight cotton sweaters are exactly right and they look great. What also impressed me is that Quince sells everything for 50 to 80% less than similar brands because they work directly with with ethical factories and skip the middleman. So you're paying for the quality, not the middleman, not somebody else's marketing budget. And it isn't just clothing anymore. We've picked up things for the house and for travel too. And the quality is consistently excellent. Make your summer wardrobe easier. Go to quints.com sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-E.com sysk for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com sysk. Hamburgers are about as all American as you can get. Or are they are hamburgers from Hamburg, Germany and that's how they got the name or were they first created here in the US There are actually several conflicting Stories about where and when the hamburger first surfaced. And it's an important story because from that first hamburger has grown a huge appetite for more and a giant industry. To satisfy that appetite, writer Chris Carosa decided to do some detective work to discover just where the hamburger came from and to try and figure out which of the several stories circulating around is the true story of the origin of the hamburger. The results of his research is in his book Hamburger Dreams. Hi, Chris. Welcome.
- [03:32]
B
Hey, how you doing?
- [03:33]
A
Great, thanks. So, of all things to investigate, you chose the hamburger. How did you get this idea and decide that this was a story worth digging into?
- [03:44]
B
It's a kind of a weird story. I was a senior in college, and I was assigned to write a paper about the biography of my hometown of Buffalo, New York. And in that process, I looked at an old newspaper that said buffalo is the place where the hamburger was made. First made. So I went and I told some of my roommates, and they said, no, New Haven was. And then I forgot about it, because it wasn't that it didn't have anything to do with the subject of the paper, but I remembered it. Spent six years researching old newspapers, literature, interviewing people, trying to track down, as best I could what story is most likely to be true.
- [04:24]
A
Let's step back a little bit and talk about the hamburger itself. I mean, people say that hot dogs and apple pie are all American, but I bet we eat a lot more hamburgers than we eat hot dogs. How did it become so American, do you suppose?
- [04:39]
B
Well, according to the research that I've done, it definitely was made in America, unlike what some people think. Some people think that it was made in Hamburg, Germany, and that's how it got its name. And I tell the story in a book that was actually told in another book about McDonald's. McDonald's in the 1960s went to Hamburg, Germany, to give them some certificate thanking them for inventing the hamburger. And the mayor said, we didn't do that. So it has nothing to do with hamburger Germany. And it really came about in the late 1800s in America, and it was an invention of necessity. At that point, people were eating on the run, kind of like what we do with fast food today. But it was just beginning. And so sandwiches were very popular. And just the idea of putting a patty together, putting it on a piece of bread and serving it, that was a new thing. And it really took off, I think, probably say, in the 1920s when White Castle started their fast food franchise. And it just really blossomed after World War II when everybody came home and everybody had cars. And all of a sudden, fast food was a big thing. And the fastest of the food was a hamburger.
- [05:52]
A
Since it didn't come from Hamburg, Germany, why is it called a hamburger? There's no ham in it. If you make it right, there's no ham in it. So where does name come from?
- [06:03]
B
Well, there's lots of different stories. Each origin story has a different source of the name. Some of the stories say that it was named after Hamburg, Germany, because the German immigrants invented it. But that story was associated with an origin story that isn't true. The most popular story has to do with the actual location of the invention, which was in Hamilton. Hamburg, New York. Hamburg, New york, is a. Is a town located just south of Buffalo where the Erie county fair is held every year. And in 1885, it wasn't just called Erie county fair, it was also called the Hamburg fair. And all the signs said Hamburg fair. Not just hamburg, New York, but Hamburg fair. And when they invented it there, the story is, they didn't have a name for it. Somebody said, hey, this is great. What do you call it? And they said, well, we don't know. They looked up, they saw hamburg fare, and they said, well, it's a hamburg sandwich. And you might think a lot of people think, oh, that's just too easy. That can't possibly be true. But here's what I found out. I went and I read a newspaper from 1885 that talked about that Hamburg fair, the Erie county fair. And it brought up an example of cheese. And it actually quoted people in this article saying, what do you call this cheese? And they said, well, let's see. We call it hamburg cheese. So we know that that was the sort of thing that they did at that fair at that time. So it's possible that's probably where the name came from.
- [07:34]
A
And so why are there all these conflicting stories about the origin?
- [07:39]
B
There's no smoking gun evidence as to what actually occurred and when it occurred. So we can't tell for sure who really made it. It's like if you ask the question, who invented the wheel? Well, you know, we didn't have 247 news. Everyone with cell phones taking pictures back in the stone ages. So we can't tell who invented the wheel. Same thing with the hamburger. And nobody thought it was a big deal at the time. It didn't really make the kind of splash that you might expect that something as big as this might have made. So it went pretty much unrecorded until decades after the event. Occurred. Even the people who claimed to be the original inventors of the hamburger did not tell the stories until nearly a half a century after they did it.
- [08:23]
A
Well, isn't it possible that more than one person came up with the idea? I mean, it's not that complicated of an idea, actually.
- [08:31]
B
That's a good point. And that's how I ended the book. Oops. I gave away the ending of the book. But I tell a real story. A real story was I was a Boy Scout leader and we had to eat breakfast on a cookout. And I didn't have any utensils. So what I did was I fried an egg and put it in between two pancakes. And everyone thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. They'd never had it before. Little did we know that about five years earlier, McDonald's had to come up with a similar McGriddle type sandwich. So it's the same sort of thing. You just happen to have the same tools as everyone else and you came up with the same idea. So it's very possible that these inventions all occurred serendipitous of one another.
- [09:15]
A
How all American is the hamburger? It seems like you can find a hamburger in other places in the world, but that's perhaps more recent as fast food places have exported elsewhere. But have hamburgers been around in other places like they have been here?
- [09:33]
B
Well, they didn't start in other places. They came from America. In fact, my research brought up or found a menu that from the American restaurant in Manila in the Philippines. This is in the late 1890s. And on the menu was listed the Hamburg sandwich. So it was an American cuisine that was exported over to the Philippines so that Americans can eat this sort of food that supposedly Americans ate. And it really became popular. Like I said, it didn't become popular until early part of the 20th century, but after that, it really blossomed. And now it's a staple that everyone expects.
- [10:14]
A
But is the hamburger so popular in the United States because people truly, truly love hamburgers, or are hamburgers so popular because there's a lot of money to be made and fast food companies make a lot of money selling hamburgers to people and convincing them that they're so good?
- [10:33]
B
I think that's probably a chicken and egg type question. Here's why I say that. Certainly if you look at the standard summer barbecue the way we imagine it right now, hamburgers are part of that equation. And hamburgers were barbecued outside by people, you know, as early as the 1890s, if not before then. So we know that's been going on. Do we know for sure that it was this big pervasive type of culinary dish that everyone used at that time? It's kind of hard to tell. So it's kind of hard to tell if the hamburger became popular because of fast food or fast food became popular because of the hamburger.
- [11:16]
A
And I remember, I remember my parents and I grew up in New England, but I remember my parents sometimes referring to a hamburger as a Hamburg. We're having hamburgs tonight.
- [11:28]
B
Yes, yes, that is definitely the vernacular, the way that they called the hamburger or the hamburger when it was first invented. Pictures that I found from various festivals and fairs that refer to hamburgers as hamburgs. Like I said, that menu from Manila called it the hamburg sandwich. It was difficult for me to figure out when we switched from Hamburg to hamburger as the term that everyone preferred. But that occurred probably into say the 1920s, that sort of period.
- [12:04]
A
Any sense as to why we added the er on the end?
- [12:09]
B
I don't know. I never tried to figure that one out. And then the whole sense of burger coming after that, that's another change in the name, a shortened version of it. It's difficult for me to figure out exactly where that came from.
- [12:24]
A
Well, I guess because it's efficient. There's no other kind of burger. There's no. Well, there is now veggie burgers and chicken burgers or turkey burgers. But at the time a burger meant hamburger. So why say the whole thing?
- [12:40]
B
Right? And cheeseburger, you know, cheeseburger is another thing that people say came from Southern California. My guess is that the name cheeseburger came from Southern California. But the idea of putting cheese on a hamburger, that comes back very, very early in the story. I have a newspaper article from the Chicago Tribune, I think it is from 1894 that makes reference to a street vendor who was cooking hamburgers and putting cheese on them.
- [13:10]
A
You know what I wonder is how that first hamburger compares to today's hamburgers in the way it looks and in any other way. And I want to ask you about that when we come back.
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C
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- [15:14]
A
our SYSK trending topic today is where did the hamburger come from? I'm talking with Chris Carosa. He's author of the book Hamburger Dreams. So Chris, if you were to look at that first hamburger, would you go, oh yeah, that's a hamburger. Or would you say, what the hell is that? It doesn't look anything like a hamburger. Has the hamburger more or less stayed the same or has it evolved?
- [15:40]
B
I think that it has evolved and it has evolved in this way. Not so much the hamburger itself. The patty has always been a patty. It's the bread that surrounds it. So when we think of a hamburger today, we think of a burger or a patty on a bun. And that probably didn't come around until a little later, probably in the 1890s, certainly before the Chicago, the the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. I think that the first story that I saw said that people would cut loaves of bread and then make a wedge in them, and that's where they would put the meat. So inside this wedge of bread. Other stories say they put it between toast, but certainly it's regular bread that you put the hamburgers on. The bun came around a little bit later, around the 1890s and again, the first person who did that. There's a story that says someone in Oklahoma did that first. And I wasn't able to determine really the origin of the bun, but certainly by the end of the 1890s, there were places that had hamburgers and buns
- [16:52]
A
on the menu and then have people always put ketchup on them and other things, or did that.
- [16:57]
B
That's a great question. You know, everybody asks that question because you think, you know, oh, there's ketchup, there's onions, there's pickles, all this kind of stu. And the answer is no. In fact, some of the origin stories say it's not a hamburger if it has anything on it. That's the way they define what a hamburger is. What I could say, though, is that in the early 1900s, when they were selling hamburgers at fairs and carnivals, they did have condiments on the side.
- [17:23]
A
Often you hear hamburgers mentioned in the same sentence as hot dogs, as if they're cousins or something. Oh, what are you having? Oh, we're having hamburgers and hot dogs. Because somehow they go together. Why do they go together?
- [17:37]
B
There's a story, I think that. There's a story that came out of the 1904St. Louis World's Fair that both hamburgers and hot dogs were invented there. And that's not true. And that was actually explained well before I wrote my book. One of the other books that was written was written by a historian from Chicago, Pamela Vaccaro, who tells us about hot dogs. Hot dogs, in fact, weren't invented necessarily in America. They came over from a German immigrant whose name I can't remember right now, but for the longest time, they were considered the American dish. You know, America is baseball, apple pie and hot dogs. And I think that had to do with the whole sense of how easy it was to cook hot dogs. So you can cook them very fast, serve them fast, so they make a great ballpark type food. And by the way, this whole sense of fast food, the way we recognize it today, you know, I mentioned White Castle, and obviously we think of McDonald's and Wendy's and Burger King and all the rest of them. But well, before that, after the Civil War, there was a popularity that just sprung up of people going out to horse races to eventually baseball games, to doing these activities outdoors. And they kind of sprung up this food vendor industry. And it's that industry where we got the hamburgers and hot dogs and all that kind of fun stuff. I just think that it's probably that the Hot dogs were before the hamburgers. They came over well before the hamburger was invented. So they were a staple that people were used to seeing.
- [19:16]
A
So how many stories are there that people are very firm about that? No, the hamburger started here. How many different stories origins are there?
- [19:25]
B
I say that there's four and a half. And the reason why I put a half in there is because two stories overlap. There's a story about the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, A story about Seymour, Wisconsin, a story about Athens, Texas, which came by way of the St. Louis World's Fair, and a story about a lunch wagon in New Haven, Connecticut.
- [19:57]
A
And those stories are all. There are people who are very firm about each of those?
- [20:03]
B
Oh, sure, yeah, they're very firm. They have the support of the local newspapers, or at least they had the support of the local newspapers. Each of the stories came out for different reasons. The New Haven story came out because they wanted to tear down the original lunch wagon and build a medical complex. And so a bunch of fans wrote several petitions and got it put on the New Haven. What do you call those historical registers. Even got the Library of Congress to indicate that it was the origin of the hamburger. And the one in Athens, Texas, came out of research from a columnist at the Dallas newspaper In the early 70s, really, who was spurred on by the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, of all things. The stories out of Hamburg, New York, and Seymour, Wisconsin, they actually were the first stories that were recorded. They were recorded in the 20s and 30s. They kind of. Kind of fell out of favor after World War II. Nobody talked about them anymore, maybe because they were small market areas. But these other ones had national newspapers that really promoted them. Even the New York Times got involved.
- [21:17]
A
How did they get involved?
- [21:19]
B
They told the story about the New Haven Luncheonette. Louis Lunch, that's what it was called. And in there they spoke not only about New Haven, but they also spoke about the St. Louis story. They brought in Hamburger University from McDonald's. It's really pretty fascinating. That's where I did a lot of the research, trying to track down the origin of. Of these stories to see where they came from. Even the St. Louis story, which, like I said, has been discredited pretty much now. It's just fascinating why, when you go back into the newspapers, primarily after World War II, up until about 10 years ago, the de facto story was that the hamburger was invented in 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair.
- [22:02]
A
Lastly, you mentioned the relationship between hamburgers and hot dogs. What about the relationship between hamburgers? And french fries, because have they always gone together? When did they start going together? Any story there?
- [22:17]
B
Yeah. That's funny you ask that because in the Athens, Texas story, supposedly the person who invented hamburger from Athens, Texas also invented the french fries. All at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. So that was a bit far fetched. Did they always go together? Not necessarily. I think that came about over time. There wasn't. Again, my research didn't go into where the french fries came from. But if I look at the original plates or the original meals that came with the hamburgers. Hamburgers were sold by themselves. It wasn't until when you got into the fast food business or era that you started seeing french fries being sold with hamburgers. If you look at McDonald's original menu, and when I say their original menu, it's the one that predates McDonald's as we know it. It's before Ray Kroc, the original menu was very large and included french fries and all these other things. The thing that really brought McDonald's into the forefront was they reduced their menu to essentially hamburgers, french fries and a shake. And that's I think when you got that kind of juxtaposition between hamburgers and french fries.
- [23:33]
A
Yeah, that makes sense. You know that they. You need to sell something to go along with it because you can make more money if you sell something and that goes with it. So sell that.
- [23:42]
B
That's right.
- [23:43]
A
So from your research, you're convinced that the hamburger started at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York. Others will contend that it started in New Haven. Others will contend it started in St. Louis. Others think it's Wisconsin. And we'll see where it all goes. Chris Carosso has been my guest. He is a writer and author of the book Hamburger How Classic Crime Solving Techniques Helped Crack the Case of America's Greatest Culinary Mystery. And you will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Chris.
- [24:15]
B
Thank you very much.
- [24:16]
A
And that's today's Sysk trending episode. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to something you should know.