Features

Top photos by Dan Bishop, bottom photos by Christopher Bluhm

WHEN I WAS A KID, we sometimes had this strange processed creation for dinner called Hamdingers. The TV jingle called them “hamburgers made with ham.” They tasted good on the first bite, but the flavor and texture quickly went out the window. They made me wonder why hamburgers – ground beef patties, which we had every Saturday night for dinner, either fried in a pan on the stove or (best-case scenario) grilled on the Weber – were called hamburgers when they weren’t made with ham.

In American culinary history, more than a few people take credit for “inventing” the hamburger. One of them lived in Seymour, Wis., home of the Hamburger Hall of Fame. The story goes that this fellow created the marriage of a ground beef patty and two slices of bread as a manageable way for people to eat as they tooled around an 1885 county fair. Other people push the burger’s birth back into the 12th century and the nomadic Mongol tribe, which supposedly tenderized raw meat by placing it under their horse saddles while they rode. But that doesn’t explain where “ham” came from. (Speaking of which, the late Shorewood institution Pig & Whistle produced a sandwich I lived on for a time when I was 11 – the ham-and-a-double-cheeseburger. The fact that I didn’t get ill from all the grease says something about the constitution of a growing preteen.)

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