Who invented the hamburger?
The hamburger is the perfect meal in the hand, eaten by workers on their lunch breaks, or by families who cannot afford fancy restaurants. It is the great comestible leveler, suitable alike for suburban barbecues and the front steps of tenement houses. The staple food of American democracy yields cheeseburgers, baconburgers, franchise brands, and drive-in outlets with total annual sales of five billion units. The precise origins of the patty, however, remain opaque. Nobody knows for certain who first thought of cooking a patty of minced beef and serving it inside a fresh-baked bun. The earliest use of the name was for an 11-cent dish, the ‘Hamburger steak’, served at a New York restaurant, Delmonico’s, in 1873. There is no mention of buns or relish.
