Often called America’s greatest culinary gift, the humble hamburger has a rich and surprising backstory that spans continents and centuries. Join renowned burger expert George Motz, author of Hamburger America, as he unearths the fascinating history of this iconic American invention. From its unexpected beginnings in a bustling German port to its transformative journey across the Atlantic, discover how a simple patty of ground beef became a global sensation.
But the hamburger’s path to American hearts wasn’t always smooth. Explore how this German-inspired dish truly became an American staple, battling skepticism and adapting with clever innovations like serving it on a bun. Learn about the visionary efforts of figures like Billy Ingram and Walt Anderson, who, after the challenges posed by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, built the trusted White Castle brand, ultimately revolutionizing how Americans embraced ground beef. This incredible tale of ingenuity and persistence reshaped our national palate and cemented the hamburger’s place as a beloved American classic.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: 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, restaurateur, and the creator of the documentary, Hamburger America. Let’s get into the story.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: How did I get into burgers? It was actually an accident, the complete fluke.
00:00:38
Speaker 3: In my thirties.
00:00:39
Speaker 2: 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.
00:01:09
Speaker 3: Most foods have been borrowed.
00:01:10
Speaker 2: 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…
00:01:20
Speaker 3: Something from the mother country. The hamburger does not.
00:01:23
Speaker 2: 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, 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…
00:02:01
Speaker 3: Two, and you had to eat cheaply and well.
00:02:03
Speaker 2: And one of the very popular dishes at the time was something called a fricadelle, or just basically chopped beef that was pattied 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 next. The pickle came soon after. So if you find a hamburger today that has mustard, pickle, and 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 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 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 a hot dog and they thought, ‘Why can’t the Hamburg steak be portable?’
00:03:25
Speaker 3: And there goes the rest of the story.
00:03:28
Speaker 2: 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 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 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 ground beef—and he knew that he could actually exploit that. The two 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 water tower that saved Chicago, its 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 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 hamburgers 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 a lot of time suing 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 U.S. that are called—we have a White Hut in Massachusetts, we have White Manna in New Jersey, White Rose in New Jersey.
00:05:57
Speaker 3: There’s so many places, actually.
00:05:58
Speaker 2: Out there today that all sell 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 the nineteen twenties, at a place in California, we see the 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.
00:06:37
Speaker 3: I mean, you’re talking: you go all the way to the nineteen sixties, and…
00:06:41
Speaker 2: 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.
00:06:52
Speaker 3: One of them is ketchup.
00:06:53
Speaker 2: Ketchup on a burger, we believe, came from some of the fast food chains in the nineteen forties and 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. 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 L.A., which I believe was the nineteen twenties, but that was it. Big Mac didn’t have a sauce on it until the 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 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.
00:07:57
Speaker 1: Had a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery, and a special thanks to George Motts, a burger flipper, restaurateur, 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. 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 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 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which sort of ruined hamburger for a while, or at least the idea of eating hamburger meat. 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 of the hamburger: a history here on Our American Stories.
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