The Timeless Famous Hamburger

School has officially begun, yet our household is refusing to let go. In one of our last testaments to the jovial season my dad demanded to grill. My mom and I did not refuse him, we had fresh tomato and onion smiling at us from the table wanting to be used. Pure and straightforward is the way to go: salt, pepper and ground beef. Let the smoke of the grill speak for itself and vegetables will only encourage this phenomenon.

The hamburger has become one of the icons of American culture. Endless TV shows, books, magazines and restaurants have devoted themselves to ground beef and its condiments. The United States holds that our ancestors were the fist to combine steak with bread, yet the two have been around for a majority of human history and surely someone had munched on a hamburger in their cave or farmhouse. I found that ground meat originated with the warrior Mongols who would place filets of meat under their saddles as they rode allowing it to crumble and cook. Not very yummy sounding but I guess if you are a macho solider it was a grand meal and the ultimate of fast food. They then dropped this culinary tip in the Russian culture who developed steak tar tare. The port city of Hamburg was introduced to minced meat by the Russians and these German immigrants brought it to the States.
Okay so now we understand the history of the meat but what about the bread? Well the official sandwich wasn't developed until the 1765 when the Earl of Sandwich requested a snack he could eat without getting his fingers dirty as he played cards. In 1904, at the St. Louis Fair, two different men are attributed to selling hamburgers, but there is also accounts that two men from Hamburg, New York were at the Erie County Fair in 1892 and ran out of sausages and instead put ground beef on the bread. An yet another tale of a young teen, Charles Nagreen, made sandwiches with meatballs and sold them at the Seymour fair in 1885, so people could snack as they walked. Numerous tales attribute the founding of the hamburger to a variety of different businesses and people but all in all, we have the sandwich, we enjoy the sandwich, we eat the sandwich.

From A Teen Foodie

Here are a few tips on the "perfect burger", allowing a clean palette for you to paint -urrr-cook upon.

• To keep it healthy we use 93% lean ground beef
• A good portion size is about 4oz
• Insuring a flat patty as the end result, intend the middle
• Don't press on the beef while cooking, you will dry it out
• When the burgers are finishing add cheese and the bun so they are both nice and warm