Hamburger: America's Favorite Dish
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The hamburger is America's favorite dish. It's the popular choice at the drive-in, as "Salisbury steak" it appears on menus in the swankiest restaurants, and it is made several times a week in most American kitchens. On a fine spring, summer, or autumn day in any town or city from Maine to California, Montana to Louisiana, you can smell the burgers sizzling on millions of charcoal grills. Steaks are wonderful barbecue food too, but burgers are cheaper and easier to eat.
Fundamentally, a hamburger is nothing more than salted and peppered ground beef, grilled or broiled, fried or barbecued, sandwiched in a bun, and eaten out of hand. But a hamburger can be an elaborate creation with a filling of its own, a cheese topping (which make it a cheeseburger), or layers of all kinds of stuff piled upon it-onions, relishes, lettuce, tomato slices. Perhaps what we need is a handy little hamburger dictionary. It might read something like this:
Baby Burger: Not a cannibal sandwich, as one might think, but a hamburger made tiny, for a tiny bun, served at the cocktail hour.
Beef Tartare: This is a cannibal sandwich! Raw beef with sharp seasonings, served usually on rye bread. This kind of burger was the original hamburger from Hamburg, Germany. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and other cities where there is a large German population, the tartar steak, as it also is called, is very popular. Often you make your own, spreading raw ground beef on pumpernickel bread and adding salt, lots of pepper, onion, a sauce, perhaps a raw egg, or some cheese.
Salisbury Steak: A fancy hamburger, usually prepared with the best ground beef (possibly even sirloin) and a wine or mushroom sauce. The term came into popular use during the days of World War I, when every Fritz called himself Frank, and nobody dared confess to a liking for -wienerschnitzel or sauerkraut. A Dr. J. H. Salisbury earlier had popularized a diet consisting of broiled ground meat, served three times a day. His name lingers on in the grander versions of hamburger. (The broiled burger he advocated made its American bow at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the St. Louis Fair of 1904.)
Spoonburger or Scoopburger: A popular kind of "loose" hamburger, usually highly seasoned and spooned or scooped into the bun.
Sloppy Joe: Teen-ese for spoonburger. The kids will eat twice as many if you call them Sloppy Joes, so govern yourself accordingly. And there are chickenburgers, lambburgers, crabburgers and shrimpburgers, too. Almost any chopped-up, well-seasoned, edible mixture which can fill a bun neatly may be sailed a burger.
Ruth Ellen Church
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   Beauty HealthHamburger: America's Favorite Dish
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