Hamburger history is dripping with lies.

One popular story goes that in 1900, a customer walked into Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Conn., and asked for something he could eat on the go. Owner Louis Lassen improvised by giving him a patty of the restaurant’s steak trimmings between two pieces of toast. The customer got his carryout lunch, and the world got the hamburger sandwich.

The story has been repeated many times by Connecticut and national publications, but I have recently found proof it is not true.

Lassen may well have conceived of his sandwich on the spur of the moment, but at that point, many U.S. businesses were serving hamburgers.

In January, I wrote a story that raised questions about Louis’ Lunch’s standing as the birthplace of the hamburger. However, I was not able to definitively disprove the claim. After the story ran, a reader named Thomas Pieragostini emailed me a link to ads that appeared in the Shiner Gazette in Texas in the spring of 1894 that advertised “hamburger steak sandwiches” being served at a local saloon.

This early burger reference inspired me to dig deeper, and I have since found more than a dozen newspaper references to hamburgers in the 1890s, including in Virginia, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, California and even Hawaii. These findings debunk the Louis’ Lunch claim and suggest other burger origin stories are not true either. In Wisconsin, many claim the burger was invented by Charlie Nagreen, who purportedly sold a meatball between two slices of bread at an 1885 fair in Seymour. In Athens, Texas, the title of “hamburger creator” is bestowed upon Fletcher Davis, who supposedly came up with it in the 1880s. Other burger origin stories can be found in New York, Oklahoma and elsewhere, but they lack documentation.

It turns out chopped meat served between or inside bread is nearly as ancient as civilization.

“A first-century AD Roman cookbook by Apicius has a recipe in it that is suspiciously close to the modern burger, a minced meat patty blended with crushed nuts and heavily spiced and cooked,” says George Motz, a filmmaker and author who has researched burger history extensively.

In the mid-1700s, “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy” by Hannah Glasse carried a “Hamburgh sausages” recipe, which was served on toasted bread. In Germany, a meat patty on bread called Rundstück Warm was popular by at least 1869.

But the true precursor to the burger we know today seems to be an inexpensive dish called hamburger steak, which began appearing on American menus in the early 1870s. (A menu, allegedly from Delmonico’s in New York City in 1834, listed the dish. It was eventually exposed as a fake.)

These minced beef and onion patties were served on a plate, not bread, and took their name from choice cows raised in the countryside around Hamburg that supposedly provided the beef. Originally, the meat was minced by hand, but as meat grinders became more available in the late 1800s so did hamburger steaks. By the 1880s, hamburger steaks were available at restaurants across the country. Often these steaks were served in locations that also served bread and sandwiches.

Given the frequent proximity of hamburger steak and bread – buns came later – combining these foods doesn’t seem like the work of a culinary genius. Instead, it appears to be a natural evolution.

By the late 1880s, hamburger steaks were popular across the United States. In 1887, a New York lodging house advertised “a bowl of coffee, hamburger steak and bread” for 10 cents. A few years later, in 1891, the Boston Globe carried an ad for a butcher shop selling a cookbook with a recipe for “hamburger on toast.”

A blurb in the July 25, 1893, edition of the Reno Gazette-Journal in Reno, Nevada, announced that Tom Fraker had taken over the lunch counter at a local saloon, noting “Tom prides himself on his ability to make hamburger sandwiches.”

The following month, an ad boasted Fraker’s “celebrated Hamburger steak sandwiches are always on hand to replenish an empty stomach and fortify even Satan himself.”

Such a sinful association was not uncommon during the early burger history. Sold primarily at saloons and all-night lunch carts that catered to factory shift workers, the dish, at least in the imagination of polite society, seemed to have “something of the night” about it.

“‘They love darkness whose deeds are evil,’ is probably as good a reason as any why Hamburg steaks are cooked and eaten on the streets at night,” begins an 1894 San Francisco Chronicle account of street carts selling hamburger sandwiches. “A popular demand for this luxury at 2 o’clock in the morning has added a strong flavor of onion to that delicious combination of odors which surprises and delights the stranger who visits the business portion of this city between twilight and dawn.”

As I dug deeper into the burger’s history, I found that historian Andrew Smith had discussed some of these burger references from the 1890s in his 2008 book, “Hamburger: A Global History.” Even so, regional burger-origin stories or what Smith calls “hamburger fakelore” continue to be taken as gospel in parts of the United States.

Folklorist Lucy Long says factually shaky tales of historic food “firsts” extend beyond the burger. “It’s very, very common for these origin stories to be claimed,” adds Long, the founder and director of The Center for Food and Culture.

Having the “first” of any food helps draw customers, Long explains. But they are also fueled by how that food ties in with our sense of place and identity.

“History is always a selection of what happened in the past along with an interpretation,” Long says. “People hear something, it makes sense to them, they like the image that it presents, so they start presenting it as history.”

Pieragostini, whose tip helped lead me down the burger rabbit hole, understands this pride. He used to have a local access TV show called “Connecticut Stories” and has defended Connecticut “firsts.” Pieragostini’s great uncle patented the stoves used at Louis’ Lunch, and Pieragostini was a longtime defender of that burger origin story.

But when Pieragostini unearthed an 1894 ad for “hamburger steak sandwiches” at a Texas saloon, he reached out to me to help set the record straight. “I was a little shocked,” he says, “but not disappointed, because you’ve got to find the truth.”

Related Stories