Pretty much every time it is on a menu. American cheese is cheese. You cant put “cheese” on the menu and have it not be cheese, just like any other ingredient. Even the lowly Mcds cheeseburger is “Pasteurized Process American Cheese”. Now, a step down is Pasteurized Process American Cheese food. But they’d have to list that on the menu, and they aint doing that.
American cheese is not snacking cheese or cheese platter cheese. It is used as it melts just right.
I don’t like cheese on hamburgers unless it’s crumbled bleu cheese, which in general is not a thing at fast food places. I’ve been burned so many times that I don’t walk away from the counter or pull away from the drive-thru until I’ve visually confirmed that there is no cheese on the burger, and I won’t order burgers for delivery at all.
Lately I’ve had success by always making an additional special request - no cheese, extra pickles, for instance. I don’t really care about the pickles, but in my experience the drone in the back who’s trying to make ten sandwiches at a time will pay more attention if there are two special requests on the order screen instead of just one.
That’s probably because most (if not all) East Asians are lactose intolerant. They don’t eat cheese in general.
As I heard the story, Hamburgers may have originated in Germany, but they came to the US on ships of the Hamburg Line. They were more like meatballs than patties, and came with ordinary slices of bread. The meatballs were eventually flattened into patties to make them cook faster. Buns came later, probably at White Castle, which started operating in 1921.
I get the confusion aliens might have over the nomenclature (“Ham” vs “Beef”), but what I don’t understand is the term “cheese food.” It brings to mind all sorts of yucky things I’d rather forget about.
The question was rhetorical, but that’s a very good article explaining the difference.
The History Channel has an episode in The Food that Made America about James Kraft, who invented processed cheese prior to WWI. He made a fortune selling the stuff to the US military once we were in the War. Some breweries survived Prohibition by converting their facilities to produce processed cheese.
There’s a restaurant in New Haven called Louis’ Lunch, which purports to be the oldest continuously operating hamburger restaurant in America and has supposedly been serving burgers since 1900. They cook the patties in a vertical cast iron broiler and serve them on white toast with a wedge of grilled onion, a slice of tomato, and (optionally) a sharp cheddar cheese spread.
If I ever find myself in Connecticut I may have to try one, sans cheese, and hopefully cooked all the way through if they’ll do it that way (all the pictures I can find online have the patties cooked medium rare, which squicks me out even though they apparently do grind their own beef on the premises).
Louis (Ludwig) Lassen started his lunch business in a mobile cart before moving to permanent facilities in 1917. Other hamburger joints have claimed to be the first in the years since, but Louis’s has been recognized as the oldest by the US Library of Congress.
A place called Jack’s Lunch in Middletown, CT, is credited as being the first joint to offer steamed (as opposed to fried) burgers during the Interwar years. Cheese is steamed as well and added to the burgers when they come out of the cabinet.
According to Wikipedia, they’re largely a Connecticut thing:
Availability and distribution in central Connecticut
Ted’s Restaurant in Meriden is the most famous eatery that serves steamed cheeseburgers, but they are also available at establishments in the adjacent towns of Wallingford, Middletown, Portland, and Cromwell, further east in East Hampton, and further south in North Haven. Ted’s also operates a food truck called the Steam Machine, which sells steamed cheeseburgers further north at UConn Huskies football games, at Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field,in East Hartford, Bushnell Park in downtown Hartford, and the Xfinity Theatre in Hartford. Ted’s also has a concession stand behind section 101 inside the XL Center arena in Hartford.
There’s a place in Raleigh, NC called Char-Grill. They have a unique ordering system (at least at their original downtown location) – you grab a paper order slip and a golf pencil and check the items you want and the toppings you want on it, then drop the slip through a slot. The first time I went there I was so accustomed to fast food places that had certain default toppings on their burgers it didn’t occur to me that at Char-Grill I had to specify literally everything I wanted on it. I just checked “hamburger” and dropped the slip through the slot and I received literally just meat and a bun and nothing else. I suspect the OP would like that ordering system.
I think it is mainly about profit. Just like the top choices in the new (Canada) Subway menu often default to adding extra meat, extra cheese or premium toppings. You can get the basics or “build your own”, of course, but probably most pay more and don’t squawk, or even notice. In fairness, many like and want the extra cheese or whatever.
The only place I request “no cheese” is at Subway. Not because I object to cheese in general, but I find that having a few slices of processed cheese adds almost no flavour to a sandwich that has a bunch of pickles, peppers, mustard, etc. on it, so they might as well save the expense of putting it on. About 15% of the time they start putting cheese on anyways, but c’est la vie.
