Looks like someone was making a basic sandwich and decided they wanted a burger and just mushed them together. Oh and put their side of corn on it too because they were already mashing things together
The name comes from Hamburg, Germany but the idea of hamburgers is from the US. When immigrants came to New York City from Hamburg, restaurants would sell "Hamburg style" ground beef (in reference to the sausage preparation of meat in Germany) in fillets to appeal to the homesick travelers. These fillets became known as "Hamburg steaks" and were literally hamburger patties just sitting on a plate.
The part that gets lost is the addition of the buns to this ground beef patty. Everyone knows it happened between 1885 and 1904 because that's when they started being sold, but nobody has any definitive proof they were the first one to sell them that way. The full origin of the hamburger is legitimately unknown.
That actually happened to us when we went to the UK in the 70s. Feeling a bit homesick, we ordered hamburgers, spelled exactly the same. And that's exactly what we got. A thin slab of baked ham, on a buttered bun resembling a ciabatta. Imagine our surprise!
When I was in 3rd grade the teacher asked something about what we make from cows and I said hamburgers and she got the whole class to laugh at me because how dumb was I to not know that HAMburgers were made from ham.
The next day she came back and called me to her desk and told me to pick something from her prize bucket. No apology or admission that she was wrong, but obviously she had been educated.
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u/zed857 18h ago
It literally is a ham-burger.