I’ve had it with hamburger.
How many times have I heard it: I love a good burger. But when is enough, enough? Once a week? Twice? More? For shame! And you feel the shame. You give the game away when you order: I’ll just have the burger, with ________ (insert topping) and French fries. Love and marriage, horse and carriage, burger and fries. You know what you are doing; denigrating cuisine, American cultural identity and defiling the planet — nothing less. But these are not the only reasons that I have had it with hamburger.
We are in the midst of a hamburger growth period. Celebrity Chefs are even cozying up to the pre-masticated bolus of bovinity.
Ever since it was notably introduced at the 1904 St. Louis Universal Exposition, along with iced tea, peanut butter, ice cream cones and the hot dog, the hamburger has never looked back. But we have been wolfing down the bits of beef even before that. Early food fadist, Dr. James Henry Salisbury plated up his minced beef in the shape of a steak as a palliative for Civil War combatants suffering from diarrhea. Yum.
Maybe Philly is to blame? Andrew Smith thinks so. In his little tome, Hamburger: a Global History (Reaktion Books), he credits a German restaurant at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial for popularizing the ground beef patty.
The 1884 edition of, The Boston Cooking School Cookbook, included a recipe for broiled meat cake and one for hamburg steak. Ten years later, New York’s swank Delmonico’s restaurant had Bifteck à Hambourgeoise on the menu. But the bun had yet to rear its clam-shaped head.
That was left to “Hamburger Charlie.” At the Seymour, Wisconsin County Fair of 1885, a teenaged meatball vendor named Charlie Nagreen who, in a cataclysmic moment of necessity being the Mother of Invention, flattened the roll around beef balls and put them on a bun. Until his demise in 1951, he hawked his “invention” singing; “Hamburgers, hamburgers, hamburgers hot; onions in the middle, pickle on top. Makes your lips go flippity flop.” In 2007, the Wisconsin Legislature named the town of Seymour the “home” of the hamburger.
In, Eating History, (Columbia University Press), Andrew Smith claims that “... by the 1890’s it had evolved into the quintessential American food, the hamburger sandwich, and was sold by street vendors in most American cities.” Could this be true? Why then can New Haven, Connecticut claim to be the home of the hamburger? It was, they say, in 1900 that Louis Lassen of Louis Lunch wagon invented the demon burger out of shreds of left over beef. They even made it official. In 2000 it was recorded in the Congressional record: “... the invention and commercial serving of one of America's favorites, the hamburger ...” was a “Connecticut Legacy”.
For my money it was J. Wellington Wimpy, the cartoon character, who is responsible for making them an American icon. Always ravenous for another burger, the perennially short-on-funds Wimpy would ask his next mark: "I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today." The 1931 bald-faced con still has ironic currency.
By the time of the wily Wimpy, White Castle was ten years old. First opened in Wichita, Kansas the purveyor of the tiny, steamed with onions, buy ‘em by the sackful” burgers were already known as “sliders” (because they went down easy). The recent resurrection of that term is further evidence of the current gastronomic decline.
In the banner year of 1948, in San Bernadino, California the first McDonald’s was opened and thus began the institutionalization of ground beef. They were billed as a family restaurant but they did anything but bring the family together around the dinner table. In fact they helped fragment it by making it possible to eat quickly and alone at anytime, and almost anywhere. But that wasn’t the worst of it.
In his 1993 Book, Beyond Beef, Jeremy Rifkin points out that between 1948 and 1982 the fast-food industry grew from “8 percent to 30 percent of the away-from-home food market.” He states that “over 42 percent of the total United States population now eats out at least once a day.” And that was 17 years ago. Every month tens of thousands of head of cattle have to be fattened, slaughtered, and ground into patties to provide millions of hamburgers for hungry customers. To keep up with our appetite, land in other countries (Africa, Central America) had to be confiscated, cleared for raising cattle. Not to mention the forty-seven pounds of manure and the release of the greenhouse gas methane that every steer is responsible for on a daily basis. Nor will I bring up the recent New York Times exposé of the use of ammonia to keep E. coli in ground beef in check.
Eric Schlosser’s, Fast Food Nation, looked at every aspect of fast food and its impact on the world. Being the biggest, McDonald’s, became a worldwide symbol of American imperialism. Famously, a sheep famer named Jose Bove took on McDonald’s in France in 1990. A nation in love with its gastronomic history would have none of it, so he led a group that demolished a McD’s under construction. He became a hero, met with the French president and Prime Minister, wrote a book, and went on chat shows. Today, there are 857 McDonald’s in France (12, 804 in America) and McDonald’s is the single largest purchaser of agricultural products in France. The book was a best seller; the movie was a hit but no one seemed to reign in their desire for a burger.
Independent filmmaker Morgon Spurlock’s, Supersize Me!, documented thirty days on a McDonald’s only diet. The predictable results were weight gain, skyrocketing cholesterol, depression, sexual dysfunction and a nomination for an Academy Award. It was the 10th highest grossing (pardon the expression) documentary — but few gave up their burgers.
As ubiquity diminished the burger’s appeal for some, it simply needed to be taken up market. And it started early.
In the 1970’s, H.A. Winston’s, at the corner of Chestnut and Front Streets in Philadelphia, brought out the first gourmet hamburger — some forty years ago! It was a success and the burger found new life and acceptability in a different setting. We now have many versions of the Burger hybrid.
Red Robin, which got its start in Seattle in 1969 featuring a Royal Red Robin (burger with bacon, cheese and a fried egg on top), is now publicly traded and has over 400 locations. Red Robin’s Santa Fe burger, that features poblano pepper, guacamole, sautéed onions, crisp tortilla chips, lettuce and pepper jack cheese on an onion bun with Ancho mayo, fits the gourmet concept.
But chains can’t have it all. In April last year Bobby Boy-Meets-Grill Flay gave in to the single most grilled item in America. Man of the people opened his third Bobby’s Burger Palace in Paramus, New Jersey. The most esoteric burger on offer is the Napa Valley ($7.50) with fresh goat cheese, watercress, Meyer lemon honey mustard. The Philadelphia burger has provolone, griddled onions and hot peppers. The menu reminds customers that “any burger can be crunchified”, a term Flay trademarked for stuffing potato chips in the burger. Bobby says, it is his way of connecting with kids who watch the food network. With burgers?
In December of last year, one of the most respected New York Restaurateurs, Danny Meyer, made his big burger move. “The whole experience,” he said of the fast food industry, “is to cram people into a cookie-cutter space, to feed them as many unhealthy calories as possible — then get them to leave. That is where fast food went astray.” He already has three Shake Shacks in New York City serving whole-muscle, no-trimmings, fresh-ground, antibiotic-and-hormone-free, source-verified-to-ranch-of-birth, choice-or-higher-grade Black Angus beef. And it is cooked to order; so you wait. In what sounds like a mission statement he claims, “A hamburger stand is a very democratizing amenity. We hope that each new Shake Shack can become both a citizen of, and mirror of, their communities.” High minded for a burger joint. Four more Shacks in 2010 and next year — Kuwait!
On Chow.com (a worthwhile site with apparently no scruple) Alsatian born master chef Hubert Keller, owner of the superb Fleur de Lys restaurant in San Francisco (77 Sutter Street) will show you how to make a Burger right. He should know, he owns Burger Bar at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas where you can be a high roller and order the $60 Rossini Kobe beef burger (like Tournedoes Rossini it incorporates foie gras, truffles and madeira demi-glace), or for a mere $24.25 the surf and turf with half a lobster crammed in. That certainly takes the lowly burger to another dimension.
Brilliant Chef-owner Laurent Tourondel has the monogrammed BLT Burger locations (New York, Las Vegas, Hong Kong). Amidst the familiar and the exotic is the Banh Mi Burger, a turn on the Vietnamese classic.
What’s my beef? When chefs who can cook, really can cook, and restaurateurs who know better stoop down to the burger, they contribute to the descent to the lowest common denominator. Are they challenged by the idiom? Are they in it for the burger bucks? Surely they cannibalize their own more lofty efforts and dumb down any potential audience. If they further imbed the validity of the burger as an acceptable everyday (and I do mean everyday) food item don’t they further expand the devastation? And what do we really like about them? The unchallenging familiarity? The democratizing effect of eating with your hands? The ‘have-it-your –way’ creativity myth? The greasy, salty, umami hit? It’s like blue jeans. How many variations on the denim theme can you endure? Or the baseball cap. You’re adventurous, don’t you want people to think you’re creative? If food is fashion there must be change.
I’ve had it! After all of these years, and all you know about them, isn’t it time you ordered something else?
Edward Bottone, a food and lifestyle journalist, is Chef/Instructor in the Culinary Arts program at Drexel University and has been a radio talk show host and TV presenter, and is also a food stylist and photographer.
Photograph by Kelsey Lobie; "The Cantankerous Cook" photograph from Hulton Archive/Getty Images, "Plate" photograph from FoodCollection/Getty Images.
