If Its Not Too Late, Make it a Cheeseburger

It could be because I spent this week writing about and promoting a grilled burger fundraiser.  Possibly the very the thought of a warm flame on a freaking drizzly day, in the low 60s, in July makes me think of scenarios where ark building isn’t included (See sidebar, FU Weather for a greater understanding). Maybe it is cultural zeitgeist, as an estimated 1 of 4 Americans will cook something over the flame on the 4^th of July weekend. Whatever it is, I have burgers on the brain = I have been craving the bun, meat, cheese all week.

When you use a word over 200 times in a 4-day stretch, burger starts to seem odd; kinda like you have really heard the word for the first time (man). Burger, as we use it contemporarily evolved from the term hamburger; before the meat in a bun definition, burger was a truncated version of borough in middle English (See Pittsburgh or don't see Pittsburgh - I hear it is nice). It wasn’t until 1939 that burger made it into the dictionary in the-patty-of-ground-beef sense of the word. Previously, Hamburg steak had been used to describe a chopped-beef steak: Delmonico’s offered it on their menu as early as 1834. 50 years later, the term ‘hamburger’ was used in a Boston newspaper as a stand-alone word.

By 1904, hamburgers were being served and marketed by that name at the Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition in St. Louis but whatever gains the hamburger made on the national consciousness were wiped out by the publication of The Jungle, 2 years later. A novel which turned a hungry nation away from ground meat for awhile (The rising popularity of religious vegetarianism and xenophobia - only foreigners ate ground meat also fueled the anti-burger sentiment).  It wasn’t until the rise of the White Castle in the 1920s that hamburgers established themselves as a iconic American food.

The word ‘cheeseburger’ beat plain old ‘burger’ into the dictionary by about a year…The entertaining and a tad fussy Waverly Root gets his scold on over this usage. Writing in Eating in America, Mr. Root proclaims, “The fact that ‘hamburger’ has given rise to senseless words like ‘cheeseburger’ is one of the many signs which betray the increasing degeneration of the American language.” Funny, I find our language charming because of this playfulness and adaptability. Although I do cringe every time someone says veggie-burger, it has more to do with the veggieness than the burger part.

So while many cooks will choose to throw sausages/ hot dog (July is national hot dog month) on the barbie this weekend. I will be at work dreaming of a hamburger on the grill, well cheeseburger actually, charcoal cooked beef, cheddar sharper than my wit and a cold lager and hot dog! – An exclamation that dates back too the…Okay, enough with the Cliffy Claven for now, enjoy you cookout. Enjoy your weekend.

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