Where does the word “hamburger” come from?
From Hamburg, the German port city, plus “-er,” meaning “of” or “from.” There is no ham in it at all.
A soft bun, a freshly grilled patty, lettuce and tomato. The hamburger is eaten all over the world today, and in Japan you can find every kind, from fast-food chains to specialist burger joints.
But what does the name actually mean? You might expect ham to be involved, yet there is no ham in a hamburger. The name, it turns out, comes from a place.
From Hamburg, in the Hamburg style
The “Hamburg” in hamburger is Hamburg, the port city in northern Germany. The English suffix “-er” can mean “a person from” or “a thing of,” so “Hamburger” originally meant “of Hamburg” or “Hamburg-style.”
Exactly how Hamburg became linked with a meat dish is not entirely clear. One theory says Hamburg’s workers chopped cheap, tough meat finely and cooked it; another says the dish grew out of steak tartare, made from raw chopped meat. Accounts differ.
In the 19th century, large numbers of people sailed from Hamburg to settle in America. Cooked ground meat caught on in the United States too, where it came to be called “Hamburg steak,” a thick slab of meat in the Hamburg style. The name appears in an American newspaper as early as 1884.
Who first put it in a bun?
So who first put a Hamburg steak between two pieces of bread? This, too, is a question with many claimants.
A teenager who sold a meatball between slices of bread at a fair in Wisconsin in 1885. Brothers who sold ground beef sandwiches the same year at a fair in a New York town that happened to be called Hamburg. A man who opened a small lunch counter in Connecticut around 1900. All have been hailed as the inventor, but there is no deciding proof. What is certain is that by the time of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, the hamburger was known across the country.
By the way, an 1896 Chicago newspaper described the “hamburger steak sandwich” as meat kept ready in small patties and cooked when ordered. The basic pattern of fast food was already in place.
How “burger” struck out on its own
As hamburgers grew popular, something interesting happened to the word. English speakers increasingly heard “hamburger” as “ham” plus “burger.” The word really splits into “Hamburg” and “-er,” but the dividing line had shifted.
As a result, “burger” broke away and began to act like a word meaning “a meat dish in a bun,” attaching itself to other words. A 1928 menu from a Los Angeles restaurant already lists a “cheeseburger.” By the late 1930s, “burger” is said to have been used on its own as well, and today there are chicken burgers, fish burgers, veggie burgers made from plant-based ingredients and countless other “burgers.”
New words born from misjudging where one word ends and another begins turn up elsewhere too. Words sometimes grow less from their true origins than from how they sound to the people who use them.
Japan’s hanbāgu takes its own path
In Japanese, a patty served in a bun is a hanbāgā (ハンバーガー), while one eaten on a plate without bread is a hanbāgu (ハンバーグ). In English-speaking countries, both are often just called hamburgers, and “Hamburg steak,” the equivalent of Japan’s hanbāgu, is not a particularly common term in the United States.
The first Hamburg-style ground meat dish in Japan is said to have been served in 1882, at a celebration marking the opening of a cooking school in Tokyo. A 1905 book on Western cooking calls it “hamubōgu sutēki,” and over time it became “hanbāgu sutēki” and then simply “hanbāgu.” Today there is even a Japanese-style version eaten with grated daikon radish and soy sauce, and the dish has evolved into a home-cooking staple all its own.