Hamburg Origins and Diffusion

Origins and DiffusionGround Beef and the Word HamburgerThe origin of ground beef is accepted to have been with Mongolian and Turkic tribes known as Tartars who shredded low-quality beef from Asian cattle to make it more edible and digestible. Russian Tartars, possibly through other peoples in the Baltics, introduced it to Germany before the 14th century. The Germans flavored it with regional spices and either cooked it or ate it raw. It became a standard meal for poorer classes and in Hamburg acquired the name Hamburg steak(Panati 1987). Panati (1987) claims that the steak came to the United States with German immigrants in the late 19th century but another source (Mariani 1994)claims that Hamburg Steak appeared on a menu at Delmonicos (New York City) as early as 1834. By 1899 the dish was on menus as far away as Walla Walla, WA.and in 1902 it is described in one of the most widely used cookbooks of the time, Mrs. Rorers New Cook Book (Mariani 1994). It is clear that the word hamburger predates the idea of putting the grilled beef between bread and came to this country with German immigrants.The patty between breadThere are four places in the United States (two of them in the Northeast) that claim to be where the hamburger, as a sandwich, was invented.The late Texas historian, Frank X. Tolbert, has done research claiming that Fletcher Davis invented the hamburger sandwich. As the local pottery business slowed down, Davis opened a lunch counter in the late 1880s and some oral history supports the claim that he was selling an unnamed sandwich of ground beef between two slices of bread at that time from the lunch counter.In 1904 Davis and his wife went to the St. Louis Worlds Fair. He was there since a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote from the fair of a new sandwich called a hamburger, the innovation of a food vendor on the pike. The reporter did not name the vendor but Athens resident Clint Murchison said that his grandfather had strong memories of the sandwich in the 1880s but remembered the innovator only as Old Dave. When Davis returned from the fair there were already several cafes in Athens serving the sandwich and he went back to firing pots in the Miller pottery works. Tolberts investigation proved that Old Dave was Fletcher Davis from Athens (Tolbert 1983).The story from Athens is that in town the sandwich had no name but that it was given the name hamburger at the fair. So the St. Louis Germans may have named the sandwich hamburger as a derisive gesture toward the barbaric, ground-meat gobblers in the city of Hamburg. (Kindree Miller, nephew of Fletch Davis, reported in Tolberts Texas).The promotional material for the 1991 hamburger festival in Athens stated that the McDonalds Institute had proclaimed that town the birthplace of the hamburger. While the McDonalds Corporation does recognize the St. Louis Worlds Fair, 1904, as the place where the first hamburger was served, the archives division was unable to find any reference to the study cited by the Athens newspaper (Wizniuk 1998). The person in charge of the hamburger festival in Seymour, WI, remembers the study as an opportunity for school children to vote for the place of origin and recalls that the Athens, TX, area seemed to be better organized to get out the vote. Hamburg, NYTwo brothers, Charles and Frank Menches from Stark County, were travelling a circuit of fairs, race meetings, and farmers picnics in the early 1880s. They sold sandwiches using a gasoline stove to fry the meat. The popular sandwiches at these events were pork sausage, fried egg, fried liverwurst, fried mush and fried peas porridge. The brothers decided to focus on the pork sausage sandwich. In 1885 while selling at the Erie County, NY, fair, also known as the Hamburg Fair for the county seat, they ran out of