Interestingly, Spanish has derived the names of two other beef dishes, bistec and rosbif, from English. (Although bistec doesn’t necessarily mean beef, just a “steak” of some sort. You can get bistec de puerco, for example.)
I don’t quite understand your post. I meant “Hamburg” [the city] + “er” [the suffix], as opposed to the folk etymology of “ham” [the food] + “burger” [unexplained].
Only that as I read it, there was no indication of where ‘+ er’ came from. As Donnerwetter cited, ‘Hamburger’ is ‘a native of Hamburg’ So I would have posted ‘Hamburger (a native of Hamburg) > hamburger > burger > {cheese, beef, veggie} + burger’. The rest of my post was replying to the OP, saying that **Donnerwetter[/b[ beat me to it.
It’s worth pointing out that AFAIK the dish which is today known as a “Hamburger”, i. e. a piece of meat wrapped between two slices of bread, has no German origins at all. In Germany, a Hamburger is considered the archetypical American food.
Yeah and chop suey is not from China and flaming saganki isn’t from Greece. It’s marketing baby.
Hence the apparent origin of the “Hamburg steak” in 1834 at New York’s Delmonico Restaurant (pounded meat like a Wiener Schnitzel, i.e. Viennese Cutlet, but not veal and not breaded, and likely a cheap cut, but fancy because it’s “foriegn” … sounding).
There is no extant copy of a menu from Delmonico’s in 1834. Period.
The Menches did NOT invent the hamburger sandwich. Period.
White Castle is, indeed, the oldest hamburger chain in the US. That’s true and the date is correct.
The original Hamburger steak, which indeed goes back to the mid-1800s(at least) was a pounded, tenderized beef steak. The dicing of the meat prior to the developement of the meat grinder occured in or around the 1870s.
There were hamburgers as we know them today around in the late 1880s, early 1890s. No one invented them. They simply developed independently.
It would have been nice if you had offered up a cite with such confident claims.
I do not find it at all hard to believe a writer’s claim about a menu from 1834 although of course it could be made up. A claim that an extant menu or some contemporaneous report of such a menu does not exist “period” I find harder to accept honestly. Certainly Delmonico’s claims to have been the first to have used the phrase “Hamburg Steak.”
Meanwhile, though I’ve also found this, which states
And
They also cite an English cookbook reference to Hamburgh Sausage in 1758 and Hamburg Steak in an 1844 one.
They further relay the stories of the meatball vendor I had previously heard and the claim of the Menches brothers’ family both dating to 1885.
I am not sure if there is more definitive scholarship available. Are you?
Yes. And I contribute to it over at the American Dialect Society and other places.
I’m the world’s leading authority on the Menches Brothers.
The seller of “meatballs” was Charles Nagreen of Wisconsin.
Your cookbook cites are less than scholarly. While some of them do cite scholarly texts, the actual cites are never contemporary and usually only appear in the 20th century.
I’ll give you some better cites/info later tonight.
That’s right, though. The hamburger wasn’t named after the residents of Hamburg, so the bold link didn’t occur. It was named after the city itself, so Hamburg (the city) -> hamburger (the food) and Hamburg (the city) -> Hamburger (the people) are in parallel, not sequential.
Whoa! I just went and looked at that website. Their claims are a joke.
[quote=
Delmonico’s]
First use of the expression that something is “86’d”, since the Delmonico Steak was item 86 on the menu and, when sold out, it was “86’d” (according to the Restaurant Report, Foodudes and Ask Dave)
[/quote]
What a load of crap! Show me the menu with a Delmonico steak as item 86. No one can. At least, not before 1933. That’s the earliest print cite for 86=out of an item. It was soda fountain lingo which was part of a long system of numbers as shorthand.
. Well, since they say they were there since 1837, and the first cite in the OED for restaurant in the US is 1821, someone must have beaten them to it.
Menches Brothers. A restaurant in Akron, Ohio. Where I’ve lived since 1971. Not only do they claim that they invented the hamburger, they claim they invented the ice cream cone! At a time in the past, family members suggested they invented cracker jack, but under a different name.
Fact: No single person “invented” the hamburger sandwich as we kinow it today–ground beef, cooked/grilled, and placed between slices of bread or on a bun.
But, there are four main contenders who suggest they were the first.
Fletcher Davis of Texas(1880) All of his bona fides were invented by a local Texas historian name Frank X Tolbert. All were based on third and fouth-hand recollections from people in the mid 1950s. Supposedly he invented it at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Waaaaay too late to be the invention date.
Menches Brothers, Akron OHIO. Invented at an 1885 Hamburg(NY) county fair. Get it…Hamburg NY, let’s call it a hamburger. :o Guess they forgot those stories they told the local Akion Beacon Journal writers back in the 1930s, the ones where they invented it at the 1892 Summit County Fair. Whoops!
I can confirm this part. This is the way my mother used to prepare meatballs, with onions, soaked breadcrumbs and different spices. They are indeed called Frikadellen in my neck of the woods and Buletten in Berlin. But I have never heard about a special connection to the city of Hamburg.
The idea, though, of wrapping them between slices of bread, seems to have been cooked up (so to speak) in America.