What’s a pigburger (or a hamburger made with ham) if not a ground pork patty? Is it a mixture of pork and beef? I’d call that meatloaf.
“Meatloaf” to me means it has binders and/or fillers in it. If you have egg and/or bread (crumbs) in your burger, it ceases to be a burger, by my definition. At that point, it is well into meatloaf territory, even if it’s not formed in a loaf. Others may disagree–the definition is flexible, and certainly the word “burger” is used to cover these cases, too, as long as it has the external appearance of a hamburger. Still, I’m always disappointed when I bite into a burger of any type and it’s not that lightly packed loose meat texture I expect, but instead something more like meatloaf or sausage.
Now, I do realize I am making a bit of a prescriptivist and purist definition here, and I may be a bit of a pest about it. But it’s not an idiosyncratic definition–others draw the line here, too.
The Inimitable Elia (Charles Lamb) takes up the tale.
A Dissertation on Roast Pork (1822)
Fascinating thread. In England, I grew up on Wimpyburgers… and thought there was an animal called the Wimpy!
The jury is still out on what animal, if any, Wimpyburgers come from.
As I recall from the old Popeye cartoons, Wimpy was not very discriminating about what went into his grinder.