Introduction

My first recollection of eating away from home was at a little hamburger stand across the street from a park in Sunland, California, where I spent my early years. Fifty-eight years later I can still remember the portly elderly proprietor, his white apron splotched with grease, ketchup and mustard. His compact lunch wagon, fitted with a grill for cooking the beef patties, was hardly big enough to contain his bulk. I don’t recall side orders, cold drinks, desserts or French fries – just the hamburgers. Our family always ordered five hamburgers, at a total cost of one dollar – quite a bargain in 1950. As far as I can remember, we were his only customers, which was just as well because he took at least ten minutes to cook, garnish and wrap our burgers. When you’re four years old and hungry, ten minutes can be an eternity. We ate in the car or at picnic bench, and then ran back to play in the park.

My memories of the neighbourhood hamburger vendor were eclipsed five years later by my first visit to McDonald’s. Compared with the little cart in the park, McDonald’s was a dazzling palace. The building was clean, spacious, colourful and brightly lit. Through the forward-tilting glass façade where we placed our order, the staff – clean-cut teenage boys – could be seen going about their tasks with quasi-military precision. There were lots of people queuing but service was speedy and the waiting time was brief. The menu was very limited – hamburgers, cheeseburgers, French fries, malts or fizzy drinks – but it was exactly what the customers wanted. What’s more, the food was cheap: you could get an entire meal for less than 50 cents, and a family of four could be reasonably sated for under three dollars.

Hamburger stands were often outdoors, where customers were covered only with an awning, such as the one above in Harlingen, Texas, 1939.

The billboard outside proudly announced that McDonald’s had sold over a million hamburgers. To me, this was simply an unimaginable quantity and, frankly, I didn’t believe it. At the time, McDonald’s had just started franchising, and there were only a dozen or so outlets in the Los Angeles area. It was inconceivable that such a small chain could have served so many burgers in such a short time.

Times have changed, and so has my perception of McDonald’s. Sixty years after its founding, in 1948, as a small octagonal restaurant on E Street in San Bernardino, California, McDonald’s is a massive multinational conglomerate with more than 30,000 restaurants and an estimated 250,000 employees worldwide. Their signs now boast that they have sold more than 100 billion hamburgers, which works out to about sixteen burgers for every person alive in the world today.

The hamburger sandwich first appeared in the United States as a minor street food in the late nineteenth century. Within just a few decades the succulent sandwich became the focus of a whole new food distribution model: the ‘fast-food’ industry, which revolutionized the way Americans ate. From its birthplace, the hamburger was introduced to other countries, and by the late twentieth century it was the foundation of one of the fastest-growing businesses in the world.

The hamburger’s rise to global prominence is a lively story, peopled with short-order cooks and top-flight chefs, street vendors and captains of industry, family-run diners and massive conglomerates, burger barons and vegetarians, hard-hitting advertisers and health-food advocates, fast-food freaks and ‘slow-food’ purists, hard-nosed critics and flavour-conscious aficionados. The hamburger sandwich has achieved this success through its adaptability to local cultures and tastes, and in the process it has changed the world.

Interior of a small hamburger stand in the 1930s, Alpine, Texas, 1939.

Hamburger Fakelore

Like so many other matters related to culinary history, the hamburger’s origins are shrouded in ‘fakelore’. The Tartars had nothing to do with the hamburger; the citizens of Hamburg, Germany, had only a remote connection with the sandwich. There are several contenders for the title of ‘inventor’ of the hamburger sandwich, but no primary evidence has surfaced to support any of their claims. The frequently cited Delmonico’s menu, dated 1834 and featuring ‘Hamburg Steak’, is a fake. The oft-quoted 1904 newspaper story about the hamburger vendor at the Louis and Clark Exposition in St Louis who supposedly invented the hamburger sandwich has not been identified, and even if it were, it would clearly not be the first instance of a hamburger sandwich in America. Ray Kroc did not found McDonald’s and the first McDonald’s restaurant was not in Des Plaines, Illinois.