Hamburg steak Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Hamburg steak takes its origin from the ground-meat steak that became a specialty of the eating houses of nineteenth-century Hamburg. Hamburg was then Germany's largest port of emigration, and the ground-meat dish enjoyed there was carried to America along with the people crossing the sea.

Its ingredients were long established in Europe. Beef and onion were both rooted in the region, and cooking ground meat — shaping and grilling it, or eating it raw — had long been practised across Europe. Its forerunners reach back to the Frikadelle and Bratklops, ground-meat dishes visible in seventeenth-century Germany.

The dish appears on the American table on the current of German emigration that swelled after the revolutions of 1848. What these emigrants brought to New York and elsewhere came, in time, to be listed on menus under the port's name as 'Hamburg steak.' Its name is recorded on the menu of Delmonico's in New York in 1873 and of the Clipper in San Francisco between 1871 and 1884. It was a dish transplanted under the name of the port — and also the starting point from which it would later be laid between bread slices in America and turned into the hamburger.

One anecdote has long been handed down about the history of Hamburg steak: that 'Hamburg steak already appeared on Delmonico's menu of 1834 (by one account 1837).' If that were true, this dish would have been enjoyed in America long before the wave of immigration on the eve of the revolutions.

But that menu was a forgery. Ellen Steinberg and Jack Prost (A Menu and a Mystery, Gastronomica 2008, University of California Press) matched it up point by point: the address printed on it does not agree with the real Delmonico's, the typeface does not fit the period, items such as 'Pork and Beans' that the real house did not serve appear on it, and printed menus were not yet in common use in 1834 to begin with. In the words too, 'hamburg steak' only begins to be used around 1880 — a term that did not yet exist in the 1830s. The firm earliest attestation that can be traced in the American record is Delmonico's menu of 1873. The forged menu had made the American reception of the dish look nearly half a century older than it was.

At the core of the history one older view remains. Shaping and grilling ground meat, or eating it raw, was commonplace across Europe, and independent sources pointing to any one place of origin are scarce. On that reckoning it is nearer the truth to say that the dish itself was broadly European, while the name of the emigration port Hamburg was fixed to it as a trade name on the American side. In the English-speaking world, the port's name is attached to a ground-meat dish as far back as the 'Hamburgh Sausage' in Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery of 1758. The dish may be common to Europe, but the name of the port took hold as a brand — and it is the history of that name that tells what Hamburg steak really is.