How the Hamburger Became an American Staple

On this episode of Our American Stories, before it became a greasy icon or a late-night craving, the hamburger was an immigrant invention trying to make itself useful. German farmers working the fairgrounds needed something fast and portable, so someone tucked spiced beef between slices of bread, and the hamburger was born. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked. Then came Upton Sinclair, whose book The Jungle made the public retch and nearly killed the hamburger altogether. Only after White Castle stepped in to clean up its image did Americans start trusting it again. George Motz, the documentarian behind Burger America, walks us through how one modest sandwich clawed its way into our national identity.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
Up next, the backstory of America's greatest culinary gift to
the world, the Hamburger. Here to tell it is George Motts,
a burger flipper, restauranteur and the creator of the documentary
Hamburger America. Let's get into the story.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
How did I get into burgers? It was actually an accident,
the complete fluke.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
In my thirties.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
I was looking for a fun film subject. No one
had touched the hamburger. The hamberger wasn't really taken seriously
at all. The hamburger was seen as something that was
fast food and probably kind of gross and there for
basic sustin.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
It's not really there for anything but that. But I
would like to tell.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
You that it is the only real food invention in
America in the last one hundred and thirty years. Think
about it, pasta, pizza, doughnuts, even the hamburger itself.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
Most foods have been borrowed.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
From other countries and cultures, but pretty much everything else
out there from somewhere else has been altered in America,
but not enough that it still looks like.

Speaker 3 (01:20):
Something from the mother country. The hamburger does not.

Speaker 2 (01:23):
The hamburger is a truly American invention, and hamburgers have
a very long and sordid history. We can actually start
with what I like to call the modern day hamburger,
which is the nineteenth century in Germany, because that's actually
where the name came from. In the late eighteen hundreds,

(01:51):
if you were trying to find passage to America from Germany,
you had to leave out of the port of Hamburg,
that's where the ships left, and sometimes you had to
wait for passage on a ship for sometimes upwards of
a month or.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
Two, and you had to eat cheaply and well.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
And one of the very popular dishes at the time
was something called a fricodelan, or just a basically chopped
beef that was paddied and cooked and served on a
plate with probably some gravy and some onions. The onions
were the first condiment. We believe mustard probably was probably next.
The pickle came soon after. So if you find a

(02:24):
hamburger today that has mustard, pickle onions on it, you're
looking at a very very early primary source hamburger. But
by the time Germans had emigrated to the United States,
when they got there they found other Germans who were
eating what they called in English steak in the style
of Hamburg in New York City and other parts of
the East Coast. Eventually, as the Hamburg steak or steak

(02:48):
in the style of Hamburg moved to the Midwest. As
Germans were looking for more land and looking to go farming,
they would have to go to state fairs in search
of farm tools and farm knowledge, and of course there
were these, you know, food courts that would serve what
was then obviously ethnic food. But what happened though at
these state fairs was that the hot dog existed before

(03:11):
that by a good ten years, and that was a
portable food. It was another German ethnic food. The Frankfurter
served on bread, and I would imagine that they probably
saw hot dog and they thought, why can't the Hamburg
staate be portable?

Speaker 3 (03:25):
And there goes the rest of the story.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
That changed everything, because it became very American at that point.
Sadly for the Hamburger, Upton Sinclair wrote a book called
The Jungle, which exposed all the wrongdoings of the meatpacking
industry in Chicago. It was a huge hit and did
a lot of damage to eating habits for Americans, especially
when it came to ground beef. That's really what the

(03:48):
book was all about. It wasn't until nineteen twenty that
the hamburger's image was reversed. One guy, a visionary, a
guy named Billy Ingram, met this hamburger operator in Wichita
named Walt Anderson, and at Walt Anderson's Hamburger stand, serving

(04:11):
a very very straightforward proletarian version of the hamburger we'll
be called now a slider. He noticed that there were
little boys buying hamburgers and then running around the corner
and jumping into limousines and going back to the wealthy
side of town, people who knew they probably shouldn't be
eating it because still Americans didn't trust brown beef, and
he knew that he could actually exploit that. The two

(04:34):
of them got together and decided they were going to
clean up the Hamburger's image and decided to open up
a restaurant called White Castle. White which referred to cleanliness,
Castle referred to strength. They actually built a small structure.
It looked like a tiny little castle, and it was
modeled after the famous water tower in Chicago, the watertown

(04:54):
that saved Chicago it strength. It was strong, and whenever
they presented the burger, it was presented clean. The entire
place was clean. People wore white paper caps, their uniforms
were always spotless. In the early days, they actually ground
the beef right in the restaurants. You could see what
was going on and see how fresh it was, and

(05:16):
that changed everything. People realized that the hamburgers actually were
a good thing at that point in America. If you
did not call your hamburger White Something or Castle Something,
you were not going to sell many hambers because you
were not related to the vision of White Castle. Really,
if it wasn't for White Castle, we would not be
eating hamburgers today, that's for sure. And White Castle spent

(05:39):
a lot of time sueing everybody to try to control
their own brand, which was smart. They lost that battle
for the most part, because there are still places in
the US that are called We have a White Hut
in Massachusetts, we have White mana New Jersey, White Rose
in New Jersey.

Speaker 3 (05:57):
There's so many places actually.

Speaker 2 (05:58):
Out there today that all set well pretty much the
same burger that White Castle sold in the beginning. But
as Americans, we love to put our spin on things,
which was perfect for the hamburger, because the hamburger was
literally just a canvas waiting to be painted. But in
nineteen twenties at a place in California, we see the

(06:19):
introduction of cheese for the first time, which was an accident.
It was not supposed to be on there. And before
that there were a few things happening with the hamburger.
There was chili on a burger. The chili burger was
invented before that. Also in Los Angeles, it was not
really common even to put cheese on a burger until
the nineteen sixties.

Speaker 3 (06:37):
I mean you're talking. You go all the way to
the nineteen sixties and.

Speaker 2 (06:41):
We were still enjoying burgers with nothing more than a
few condiments on there. And there are parts of the
hamburger story that do reek of some sort of marketing
to make it more popular.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
One of them is Ketchup.

Speaker 2 (06:53):
Ketchup on a burger, we believe came from some of
the fast food chains in the nineteen forties and five
fifties pushing their hamburger to a younger generation because ketchup
was sweet, and I think kids like ketchup, So let's
put ketchup on a burger. Ketchup did not exist on
a burger before the chains got involved. And by the way,
it's the same thing that's happening right now with sauce.

(07:15):
A sauce on a burger has been around for a
long time. One of the earliest sauces in America goes
back to Bob's Big Boy in la which I believe
was the nineteen twenties, but that was it. Big Mac
didn't have a sauce on it until nineteen sixties, I believe,
and now I feel like everybody puts sauce on their burger.
When people think of the American hamburger, they think of

(07:36):
something that is old, which is true, it's been around
for a long time. They think of something that is
maybe aging or fading, and people have a hard time
generations later imagining this started out as an ethnic food
from Germany. But I would like to tell you that
the hamburger is still alive and well.

Speaker 1 (07:57):
Had a terrific job on the production, editing, storytelling by
our own Monte Montgomery, and a special thanks to George Mott's,
a burger flipper restauranteur and the creator of the documentary
Hamburger America and It's so true. I mean, why take
this food seriously because it's America's favorite food, hands down.

(08:20):
Nothing touches it. Hot dogs are not even close to second.
And it's the only real food invention, as George pointed
out in the last twenty years, and it was indeed
a distinctly American invention, starting in Germany in the nineteenth century.
But those hamburger steaks, well, a very different item than

(08:40):
what we've come to know. And of course what changes
everything are those state fairs that Germans go to when
there they see that hot dog on a bun, that portability,
It changes everything, And well, why can't we make a
hamburger steak portable? And of course one of the wrenches
in the development of the hamburger was up in Sainclair's

(09:03):
The Jungle, which sort of ruined hamburger for a while,
or at least the idea of eating hamburger meat. That
then came white Castle, still one of my favorites. And
then of course the ketchup, which was brought on by
the Chains and now well the most ubiquitous food in America,
the most distinguished meal in America by far. The story

(09:24):
of the hamburger a history here on our American stories,