Burgers and Fries

 By Bruce Shawkey

What's more American than hamburgers and fries, or a "burgerfry" as I call it when I'm hungry for a fix. I'm pretty sure this "mashup" is my own invention, because a Google search of the term turns up nothing.

    Anyway, I found this interesting book stored on the Internet Archive. Turns out hamburgers have a long and storied history, much of it occurring beyond the shores of America. Thirteenth-century warlord Genghis Khan and his fierce cavalry may have invented the hamburger.

    According to a number of sources, the Mongol leader and his members of the Golden Horde rarely left their mounts. Since the army required food that could be eaten while galloping, warriors stored raw mutton scraps in the gap between the horse's flank and the saddle. 

    After a morning of traversing rough terrain, tough meat became tenderized and more or less chopped up. All a hungry warrior need do was reach beneath his saddle, scoop out a hunk of meat, and chomp away.

    Somewhere along the way, say, in the sixteenth century, ships from Hamburg, the most important German port of the day, began to cross the Baltic Sea with regularity, docking at Russian ports where minced beef dishes were popular. And soon German seamen returned home with a taste for minced raw beef. But their wives, wise to the foul habits seamen pick up while away from home, refused to serve such barbaric fare. Instead, the Hamburg fraus began frying and broiling those patties. Turns out the women of Hamburg were quite good at it, so good that seafaring men of many a nation came to know a cooked patty of minced beef as a Hamburg steak. Sure, it would take a few centuries and a transoceanic leap before the steak met bun — not to mention fries and ketchup — but there you have it: the basic story, of how the hamburger came to be.

    Fries are another story. There's much debate about who invented them and where they originated, but most likely they started out as fried potatoes and evolved into the sticks as we know them today. As a point of reference, Thomas Jefferson served potatoes in the "French manner" at a White House dinner in 1802. When fries came to be associated with burgers is yet another story. Some say it was White Castle, which served French fries with burgers beginning in 1916.

    Of course, no one can come close to serving as many burgers with fries than McDonalds. The restaurant sells around 9 million pounds of French fries each day along with 6.5 million hamburgers. If the Mongols were alive today, they could probably eat 20 burgers with fries apiece!