A discussion of the origins of the hamburger can get as contentious as the one over which nation invented pasta. It's a great comfort food any time of year. But where does it come from? One thing seems clear: it doesn't come from Hamburg in Germany.

The original inventor? Your choices are:

a) Charlie Nagreen from Wisconsin. He invented it in 1885 by flattening a meatball and slapping it between two slices of bread;

b) The Menches brothers of Ohio. They ran out of pork for their sandwiches at the Erie county fair, also in 1885. So they grabbed some beef, flavored it with brown sugar and coffee (don't ask me) and christened it a Hamburg Sandwich after the New York state location of the fair;

c)  Louis Lassen, a butter dealer and owner of Louis' Lunch, a lunch wagon in New Haven, Conn. He invented it in 1895 by grinding up beef left over from steak sandwiches. Family legend has it that a businessman in a hurry dashed in, some day in 1900, crying for a lunch-to-go. So Lassen slammed a broiled ground beef patty between a couple of slices of bread and the hamburger was born;

d) Fletcher Davis. A food vendor at the St Louis World's Fair in 1904, he had long been cooking a ground beef sandwich at his lunch counter on the courthouse square of Athens, Texas.

Take your pick, with fries. Fans recommend Frank Ruta's at Palena and Ray's The Steaks' as the best in town.
   
   
 

2 Comments

1. jkgf

   When I really want to just indulge in comfort of a burger and don't want to cook it, I go to Z Burger. The burgers are juicy. I pair my burgers with onion rings and I�m instantly satisfied and stuffed�

2. David

   No fries at Ray's!
   
   FYI there is a great hamburger festival each year in Akron, Ohio and you can still get an original Menches hamburger there.
   
   While there are many claims to fame for the creation of the first hamburger, it really isn't that far of a stretch from ground pork stuffed in gut casing, which has been done with scraps of meet for centuries) to ground beef (does a hamburger have to be beef, btw?) on a bun.
   
   My guess is that the original hamburger was developed, roughly, around the time of the first sandwich when a messed up sausage was split open and put on a leftover piece of bread!
   
   Thoughts?