Josh Ozersky ("Mr. Cutlets") on the hamburger (LA Times, 1-29-2007)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

Finally, a scholar has addressed the hamburger dispute. (See  below.) It had 
to happen sometime, even though regional newspapers  and the AP are not all 
that interested in the truth.
...
Josh discovered that the New York Tribune article doesn't seem to exist. I  
looked at the New York Tribune 1900-1910 (now digitized by the New York Public  
Library) and also didn't find the article. That doesn't mean that the article 
 never existed--it could have been published in the New York Herald or the 
New  York Sun or the New York Press. If the Murchisons have memories and photos, 
I  can't say that a Texan didn't go to the 1904 fair. But that still doesn't  
necessarily prove anything about the origin of the "hamburger."
...
"Mr. Cutlets" gives credit to Oscar Weber Bilby of Tulsa, Oklahoma.  
NewspaperArchive has several Oklahoma newspapers. The first mention of "Oscar  Weber 
Bilby" is in 2005! There are two hits for an "Oscar Bilby" in Decatur,  
Illinois in the 1890s, and that's it. If Bilby did invent the hamburger, it  somehow 
seems to have eluded 56.7 million pages of American newsprint. The least  you 
could expect is for it to have appeared in Bilby's obituary (where it  would 
usually be picked up by other in-state newspapers). 
...
"Mr. Cutlets" is clearly wrong when he says this: "But there is one  
contender whose claim to having invented the hamburger can truly be said to be  
unassailable. The sandwich we think of today as the hamburger was almost  certainly 
invented by Walter Anderson, a Wichita, Kan., grill cook who first  made the 
sandwich in either 1915 or 1916. Anderson was the first to cook  standardized, 
flat ground-beef patties on a custom griddle and to serve them on  identical 
white buns." Sam Clements found "hamburger buns" as early as 1902.  There are 
numerous "hamburger" citations before 1915.
...
Readex will vastly improve its America's Historical Newspapers in May.  
NewspaperArchive adds 80,000 pages ever single day. I don't see the need for the  
rush. We don't know who invented fire, but people still manage to get  along.
...
I have argued for a Texas Food Museum and Hall of Fame and a food museum in  
the Smithsonian Institution, but I guess those are impossible dreams.
...
Barry Popik
Kyle, Texas
_www.barrypopik.com_ (http://www.barrypopik.com) 
...
...
...
_http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ozersky29jan29,0,289872.story?coll=
la-opinion-rightrail_ 
(http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ozersky29jan29,0,289872.story?coll=la-opinion-rightrail)   
 
Want lies with your burger?
Texas lawmakers want to declare their state the official  burger birthplace, 
but they should do a little more research.
By Josh Ozersky, JOSH OZERSKY, a.k.a. "Mr. Cutlets," is  the online food 
editor for New York Magazine and author of the forthcoming  "Hamburgers: A 
Cultural History."
January 29, 2007 

THE HAMBURGER is America's iconic sandwich, a sizzling  symbol recognized 
from China to Peru. With all due respect to the bustling port  city of Hamburg, 
Germany, a dish of chopped or minced beef (which that city's  residents, and 
others, have been eating for centuries) is not the same as the  sandwich we 
think of as the quintessential American invention. And now the  perennial question 
of who invented the hamburger is in the news again. Texas  state legislator 
Betty Brown has introduced a bill to codify the oft-repeated  claim that 
"Fletch" Davis, an Athens, Texas, grill man, created the burger and  introduced it 
to the world at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. 

The Lone  Star State's attempt to stake its claim on hamburger history caused 
an explosive  reaction in New Haven, Conn., home of the venerable Louis' 
Lunch restaurant,  which has its own long-standing claim. Other claimants, such as 
Seymour, Wis.,  and Hamburg, N.Y., have entered the debate. But none of these 
claims is  persuasive, and the most likely inventor of the hamburger is a 
person whose name  is unknown to most Americans, though we're all familiar with 
the restaurant he  founded. 

First, Texas' claim. A small library of food histories has for  years been 
circulating this tale, which was popularized by a Dallas newspaper  columnist, 
Frank Tolbert, in his 1983 book, "Tolbert's Texas." Invariably, they  repeat 
Tolbert's assertion that a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote from  the 
1904 fair of a new sandwich called a hamburger, "the innovation of a food  vendor 
on the pike." My research assistant, Andrea Murphy, and I have  painstakingly 
looked through the Tribune's archives and can safely say that this  report 
does not exist. Furthermore, there is no Fletcher Davis on the fair's  
concession list. In fact, we found no documentary evidence for Texas' claim at  all.

Louis' Lunch, on the other hand, has a blizzard of clippings and  affidavits 
to support its claim. There is only one problem: the next hamburger  Louis' 
Lunch serves will be its first. The restaurant makes a broiled  ground-beef 
patty that is served on toast. Such a sandwich is, historically and  semiotically 
speaking, not a hamburger. The hamburger as a recognized entity is  a 
ground-beef patty on some form of yeast bun. Can Louis' really claim that  nobody ever 
put ground beef on two slices of bread before? The Earl of Sandwich  himself 
might have done that. In fact, an 1894 article in the Los Angeles Times  
described a late-night food vendor who sold tamales to drunks — along with  
"trotters, ham, egg and hamburger steak sandwiches" —one year before Louis'  Lunch 
was founded. 

Other claims abound. The city of Seymour claims that  its "Hamburger Charlie" 
Nagreen invented the hamburger at the 1885 Seymour  Outagamie County Fair. 
But claims made by Nagreen, a larger-than-life local  businessman, must be 
treated with skepticism. He also claimed to have invented  the name "hamburger" 
despite its having been in common use for at least 100  years at the time. 

Probably the best of the unverified claims is that of  the Bilby family of 
Tulsa, Okla.. They claim that their great-grandfather, Oscar  Weber Bilby, first 
put together his wife's yeast buns with ground-beef patties  at his annual 
Fourth of July parties. Although there is not a shred of evidence  to support 
the claim, other than the metal griddle forged by the burger  patriarch and 
still in use in the family's restaurant, Weber's, the claim  deserves some respect 
for the simple reason that no one has ever contested it.  None of the other 
claimants mention a bun. 

But there is one contender  whose claim to having invented the hamburger can 
truly be said to be  unassailable. The sandwich we think of today as the 
hamburger was almost  certainly invented by Walter Anderson, a Wichita, Kan., grill 
cook who first  made the sandwich in either 1915 or 1916. Anderson was the 
first to cook  standardized, flat ground-beef patties on a custom griddle and to 
serve them on  identical white buns. The claim is supported both by nearly 
contemporaneous  newspaper accounts and by the fact that Anderson, with his 
partner, E.J. "Billy"  Ingram, founded in 1921 a restaurant called White Castle, 
which still makes a  nearly identical sandwich today. Moreover, because it was 
White Castle that  created the fast-food business in the U.S., and the 
hamburger business in  particular, Anderson and Ingram deserve credit not just for 
inventing the  hamburger but for inventing the culture that helped make it our 
national  sandwich. 

Texans, however, can take pride in one consoling fact. A  hamburger 
restaurant in Austin, Dirty Martin's Kum-Bak, founded only five years  after White 
Castle, also remains in business today and serves some of the best  hamburgers in 
the country. 

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