Burger

Burger (pronounced bur-ger or bur-gha)

(1) A clipping of hamburger.

(2) A disc-shaped food patty (or patty on a bun), sometimes containing ingredients other than beef including vegetarian concoctions.

(3) In Pakistani slang (usually derogatory), as burger or hamburger, a stereotypically well-off Pakistani aspiring to a westernized lifestyle.

(4) In Internet slang (apparently beginning on 4chan), an American (as in a white, US citizen); of or relating to Americans.

(5) In computer graphical user interfaces (GUIs), as hamburger button, an icon with three horizontal lines (the resemblance being to the stacked ingredients of a burger).  The hamburger label was applied retrospectively, the original idea being to represent a list, the icon’s purpose being to open up a list of options; it’s thus also known as the “collapsed menu icon”.

1939: An invention of US English, extracted from hamburger by misunderstanding (ham + burger).  Use of the noun hamburger is not exclusive to fast food.  As early as 1616 it was noted as being the standard description both of someone “a native of the city of Hamburg" and also of ships “registered with Hamburg as their home port").  From 1838 it was the name of a black grape indigenous to Tyrolia and after 1857, a variety of hen.  Technically the meat product is a specific variation of shaped, ground beef (minced meat); as a meatball is a sphere and meatloaf is a rectangular cuboid, hamburgers (and burgers) are discs.

Co-incidence of names: Earl Warren (1891–1974; Chief Justice of the US 1953-1969 (right)), Richard Nixon (1913-1994; President of the US 1969-1974 (centre)) & Warren Earl Burger (1907–1995; Chief Justice of the US 1969-1986 (right), Washington DC, June 1969: Official photo released after the formal ceremony making Burger the fifteenth chief justice.  Neither judge, both appointed by Republican presidents, much pleased the conservatives and the state of the court today is the consequence of decades of pressure and some fortuitous timing in judicial expiry. 

Not that the burger is even exclusively fast food.  Some very expensive burgers have been created although, compared to their availability, there’s considerably less publicity about their sales.  As pieces of conspicuous consumption they must have a niche but Netherlands diner De Daltons‘ (Hoofdstraat 151, 3781AD, Voorthuizen) opted to couple indulgence with a good cause, the proceeds of their Golden Boy burger donated to the local food bank.  Emphasizing quality rather than sheer bulk, the Golden Boy was actually a good deal less hefty than some of the huge constructions burger chains in the US have offered to satisfy the gulosity of some (burgers with names like Heart Attack, XXXL, 55 oz Challenge, One Pound of Elk, Sky-high Scrum, Monster Thickburger & Killer hardly subtle hints at the target market).

Golden Boy.

By comparison, the price tag of €5,000 (US$5,100) aside, the Golden Boy seems almost restrained, though hardly modest, presented on a platter of whiskey-infused smoke, its ingredients including Wagyu beef, king crab, beluga caviar, vintage Iberico Jamon, smoked duck egg mayo, white truffle, Kopi Luwak coffee BBQ sauce, pickled tiger tomato in Japanese matcha tea, all assembled on two Dom Perignon infused gold-coated buns.  The chef insists it still just a burger and should be eaten using the hands, a nice touch being that because the buns are covered in gold leaf, fingers will be golden-tinted when the meal is finished.  A Golden Boy must be ordered two weeks in advance and a deposit of €750 (US$765) is required.

People around the world had no doubt for centuries been creating meatloaves, meatballs and meat patties before they gained the names associated with them in Western cuisine.  The idea is simply to grind-up leftover or otherwise unusable cuts, add diced vegetables & spices to taste and then blend with a thickening agent (flour, breadcrumbs, eggs et al) to permit the mix to be rendered into whatever shape is desired.  The hamburger is no more an invention of American commerce that the sandwich was of the English aristocracy.

Lindsay Lohan masticating burger, Blank Magazine, May 2011.

The words however certainly belong to late-stage capitalism.  Hamburger is noted in the US as describing meat patties in the late nineteenth century (initially as hamburg steak), the connection apparently associative with German immigrants for whom the port of embarkation was often Hamburg although there is also a documented reference from 1809 in Iceland which referred to “meat smoked in the chimney” as Hamburg beef.  There are a dozen or more stories which speculate on the origin of the modern hamburger but, in the nature of such an ephemeral craft, there is little extant evidence of the early product and there’s no reason not to assume something so obvious wasn’t “invented” in many places at much the same time.  The earliest known references which track the progression seem to be hamburger sandwich (1902), hamburger (1909) & burger (1939) although burger was by then an element in its own right, acting as a suffix for the cheeseburger (1938).  The culinary variations are legion: baconburger; cheeseburger; fishburger; beefburger; bacon & egg burger; whale burger, dog burger & dolphin burger (those three still a thing in parts of the Far East although not now widely publicized); vege burger; vegan burger; kangaroo burger, camel burger & crocodile burger (the Australians have a surplus of all these fine forms of animal protein), lamb burger, steakburger, soyburger, porkburger etc.  Opportunistic constructions like burgerlicious are created as required.  The homophones are Berger & burgher (in English use a middle-class or bourgeois person).  The noun plural is burgers.

Blogger Dario D had noticed that visually, the Big Macs he bought from random McDonalds outlets didn’t quite live up to the advertising.  That’s probably true of much industrially produced food but what was intriguing was what was revealed when he applied a tape measure to his research.  It seems Big Macs can’t be made exactly like they look in the advertising because then they would be too big to fit in the packaging.

The Big Mac Index (BMI) was created by The Economist newspaper in 1986.  The BMI is a price index which provides an indicative measure of purchasing power parity (PPP) between currencies and uses movements in the burger's price to suggest whether an official exchange rate is over or under-valued.  The newspaper has never claimed the BMI is an authoritative economic tool and has always documented its limitations but many economists have found it interesting, not so much the result on any given day but as a trend which can be charted against other metrics.  It was an imaginative approach, taking a single, almost standardized commodity available in dozens of countries and indexing the price, something which should in each place be most influenced by local factors including input costs (ingredients & labour), regulatory compliance, corruption and marketing.  Even those who don’t agree it has much utility as an economic tool agree it’s fun and other have published variations on the theme, using either a product made in one place and shipped afar or one made with locally assembled, imported components.

The BMI also brought to wider attention the odd quirk.  Although its place in the lineup has been replaced by a chicken-based dish, the Big Mac used to be on the McDonald's menu in India although, in deference to Hindu sensitivities (and in some states actual proscription), it was made not with beef but with lamb; it's said to taste exactly the same which seems a reasonable achievement.  Burgers can be thematic and these are based on the seven wonders of the ancient world:

The Colossus of Rhodes (that’s a big burger with Greek lamb)

The Great Pyramid of Giza (has an Egyptian sauce)

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon (vegetarian (lettuce hanging out of it))

The Lighthouse of Alexandria (a lighter (low calorie) burger)

The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (a traditional, very high calorie burger)

The Statue of Zeus at Olympia (has a very hot sauce)

The Temple of Artemis  (Diana) at Ephesus (made with square or rectangular bun and finished with burnt edges)

Lindsay Lohan with burger.