The burger is now thought of as an archetypically American meal, but of course its name derives from the German city of Hamburg. As a major industrial port, the city originally known as Hamma Berg (Hamma Castle) makes an ideal departure point for the export of German products and people. Over the past 500 years Germans have made up the largest immigrant group in the United States, and towards the end of the nineteenth century New York became the focal point of German immigration and also the home of the American burger.
When the burger first appeared on a menu it wasn’t in a fast food café. Hamburg steak (or ground beef) is featured in 1873 by the luxury New York restaurant Delmonico’s. Ten years later, we see it beginning to reach a wider audience as a report in the Boston Journal describes how to make mincemeat, “We take a chicken and boil it. When it is cold we cut it up as they do meat to make Hamburg steak”. In 1889 the Walla Walla Union gives an early restaurant review, “You are asked if you will have pork chop, beef, steak ham and egg, hamburger steak or liver and bacon”.
It was in 1921 that the oldest surviving chain of hamburger restaurants was established, the White Castle in Wichita, Kansas. But it was the industrialisation of the burger which made it the most popular meal in the world. According to its latest annual report, in 2012 McDonald’s serves burgers to approximately 69 million people in 118 countries every day.
As well as the hamburger, the name of Hamburg itself has been a very popular import to the United States. Twenty American towns, villages and boroughs have adopted the name. The “Hamma Castle” has found many new locations to build on. And the name and product has become so emblematic of American consumerism that when the first McDonalds opened in Moscow in January 1990 it was seen as landmark in the ending of the Cold War. Within two years the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
Did you like the article? Then please like and share it on Facebook, tweet it on Twitter or add it in Google+.
