...and a side of local culture

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, regional foods, hamburgers, burgers, fries, french fried potatoes

I remember when the plain McDonald's burger cost 15¢, they'd just sold their first million nationwide, and hamburgers most anywhere else cost at least a quarter. A decade later, my first year of college, the big Hardee's burger was almost seven inches across, and when the first Arby's opened (the first widely successful loose meat burger place), their Super was as big. Today, go to an Arby's for a Big Montana, and it is almost as big as the old Super; there isn't a seven-inch burger available from Hardee's or any other fast food place, and there are about ten kinds of burger variety at any of them.

The Boomer generation is about nothing so much as about variety. The 60s kids didn't invent cultural diversity, but act like they did. At least, they had a hand in making it a positive, rather than a stigma.

There are about four things you can do to make a burger different: add various things to the patty, put different things on top, use various breads to hold it, and cook it different ways. Just a fun bit of combinatorics:

• Patty additives: cheese (inside the meat), chorizo, peppers, onions, sugar (5 items).
• Toppings: mayo, tomato-y mayo, mustard, lettuce, tomato, bacon, cheese, peppers (8 items).
• Buns: Kaiser roll, soft "burger" bun, potato roll, French bread (4 items).
• Cooking: Grilled on wire, grilled on flattop, deep fried, broasted, steamed (5 ways).

The above list just scratches the surface. However, let's ask two questions: First, pick one cooking method and bread, and zero or one item from each of the other two lists; how many combinations are there? Second (harder), pick one cooking method, one kind of bread, and any or all from the other two lists; how many combinations are there? Answers at the bottom of the post.

John T. Edge, who seems bent on eating his way across America once for each kind of food with regional variations, has followed his earlier books Fried Chicken and Apple Pie with his newest, Hamburgers & Fries. He opens with a bit of research, and we are not surprised to find that hamburgers, at least of a kind we'd recognize as such, began in poverty, with many additives and toppings initially chosen to make the poor fare palatable. Some bread-loaded burgers are more like meat loaf sandwiches, for example. (As much as I like meat loaf, it is really an exercise in feeding four hungry people with a half-pound of ground beef...or a quarter pound in a pinch.)

At the outset, the dozen or so recipes in the book make it worth the getting. From the Onion-loaded burgers of Oklahoma, born of depression-era cheap onions and costly meat; to the "Deconstructed" (loose-meat) burgers of Iowa; to the Hawaiian "local burgers", sugary, like a few other varieties; all attest to the creativity of legions of cooks doing what they can to feed their folks, and perhaps make a buck or two in the meantime.

There is just a bit too much "looking for the perfect burger" going on in the book. Otherwise, it's a great window into the many, many things people have done to ground or chopped beef, to produce one of America's favorite foods. By the way, he tips his hat to fries, but we don't do nearly so much with them, so a couple short chapters exhaust the author's enthusiasm for them.

Answers to the quiz above: 1,080 (single item from each list) and 109,200 (any mix&match). That's just with my short lists above. Put together all the variations that Edge remarks, and there are easily millions of varieties of the humble burger.