Josh Ozersky's The Hamburger is published by Yale University Press. A little over a century ago, the New York street food of choice was the oyster, which grew so abundantly that rich and poor alike ate them in vast quantities. That period feels distant and fantastic, partly because oysters are now a luxury food, and partly because it's hard to imagine a national cuisine not dominated by the hamburger. The signature American sandwich has always been an unapologetically demotic food -- at least until recently -- but Ozersky's cultural history emphasizes three principal phases in our collective consumption: first, its murky origins in "hamburger steak," first served in the U.S. but associated with immigrants from the port city of Hamburg; second, the early days of White Castle in the 1920s, when the preparation of burgers became a science and an art; and finally the postwar McDonald's era, when a ruthless entrepreneur named Ray Kroc took the fast-food model and made it franchisable nationwide, and then worldwide.
The burger is, Ozersky notes, an irreducible food, a "gastronomic endpoint, like sashimi or a baked potato." Yet somehow, with each phase, innovations prevailed. White Castle figured out that it could cook faster and more evenly and use griddle space more efficiently if it served square burgers, not round ones, and poked a hole in the center. McDonald's embraced the all-Styrofoam-and-paper service area, s ...
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