A hamburger, or simply a burger, is a dish consisting of fillings—usually a patty of ground meat, typically beef—placed inside a sliced bun or bread roll. The patties are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, bacon or chilis with condiments such as ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, relish or a “special sauce”, often a variation of Thousand Island dressing and are frequently placed on sesame seed buns. A hamburger patty topped with cheese is called a cheeseburger. Under some definitions, a burger is considered a sandwich.
Hamburgers are typically associated with fast-food restaurants and diners, but are also sold at various other restaurants, including more expensive high end establishments. There are numerous international and regional variations of hamburger. Some of the largest multinational fast-food chains have a burger as one of their core products: McDonald’sBig Mac and Burger King’sWhopper have become global icons of American culture.
Versions of the meal have been served for over a century, but its origins remain obscure. The 1758 edition of the book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse included a recipe called “Hamburgh sausage”, suggesting that it should be served “roasted with toasted bread under it.” A similar snack was also popular in Hamburg under the name of “Rundstück warm” (“bread roll warm”) in 1869 or earlier, and was supposedly eaten by emigrants on their way to America. However this may have contained roasted beefsteak rather than Frikadelle. It has alternatively been suggested that Hamburg steak served between two pieces of bread and eaten by Jewish passengers travelling from Hamburg to New York on Hamburg America Line vessels (which began operations in 1847) became so well known that the shipping company gave its name to the dish. It is not known which of these stories actually marks the invention of the hamburger and explains the name.
There is a reference to a “Hamburg steak” as early as 1884 in The Boston Journal. On July 5, 1896, the Chicago Daily Tribune made a highly specific claim regarding a “hamburger sandwich” in an article about a “Sandwich Car”: “A distinguished favorite, only five cents, is Hamburger steak sandwich, the meat for which is kept ready in small patties and ‘cooked while you wait’ on the gasoline range.”
