Hamburger: The history of Hamburg steak

There is a history that in late eighteenth century, the largest port in Europe was in Germany. Sailors who visited port brought special food called “Hamburg steak” as a popular usage. Hamburg steak was a hard slab of salted minced beef, often slightly smoked, mixed with onions and breadcrumbs.

In the early 1800s German immigrants who settled along the Ohio River brought along their recipes for beef cooked in the style of Hamburg, Germany’s largest seaport.

It was one of the biggest ports on the transatlantic route to America. The majority of immigrants heading for the “New World”, to New York, would embark here. In the Big Apple, various restaurants would offer beef fillets in the Hamburg style in the hope of attracting German sailors to dine.

In 1834“Hamburger Steak” was listed at 10 cents, one of the costliest items on the menu, at Delmonico’s in New York.

The Boston Journal in 1884 quoted a local chef’s reference to chopped “Hamburg steak,” the first published reference to the beef patty.

Although the hamburger wasn’t called “fast food” then, the first business that can accurately be called a fast food restaurant was White Castle, which began in Wichita, Kansas in 1921. It sold hamburgers for five cents each.

Their burgers were different from today’s version: they were cooked with onions and they were smaller, so most customers ate more than one at meal.

The hamburger grew in popularity during the 20th Century along with the rise of the fast food industry, taking on a special symbolism throughout the century.
Hamburger: The history of Hamburg steak

History of cheese in United States

Many countries have developed one or more varieties of cheese peculiar to their own conditions and culture.

When the Pilgrims voyaged to America in 1620, they made sure that the Mayflower was stocked with cheese. When the colonists settled in the New World they brought with them their own methods of making their favorites kind of cheese. Cheese making in North America and specifically in the United States, remained a farmhouse process throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In 1851, entrepreneur Jesse William had built the first US cheese factory near Rome, Oneida County, New York and introduced production in a grand scale.

After extensive experimentation, Williams regulated the timing as well as the temperature for converting milk to curds, regardless of volume.

In 1867, Robert McAdam introduced the English Cheddar system in a factory near Herkimer, New York. This introduction made Herkimer County famous for its cheese.

For many years during this period, the largest cheese market in world as at Little Falls, New York.

As the population increased in the East and there was a corresponding increase in the demand for market milk, the cheese industry gradually moved westward.
History of cheese in United States

History of delicatessens in New York

Delicatessen is an adaptation, borrowing from the French, and German words referring to the place where one bought delicatesse, ‘delicious things’, such as cured meats and cheese. Germans prefer to open so-called delicatessens, retail stores that sold specialty food items.

According to Artemas Ward chronicler of the nineteenth century grocery trade, the first delicatessen in America opened on Grand Street in New York City around 1868. At that time, Manhattan’s Lower East had a substantial German immigrant population.

The deli evolved from an effort of the residents who began selling homemade foods from their tiny tenement apartments and pushcarts. At some point, the first budding entrepreneur saw a business opportunity and moved the home or mobile operation into storefront.

At the delicatessens, one could grocery shop for kosher foods, fresh meats, salads, fish, bread, pickles, knishes and other products or sit at the counter or tables to enjoy a gargantuan corned beef sandwich or piece of cheesecakes. German delicatessens stores in New York did a brisk business especially at Christmas time by purveying dozens of kind of sausages, smoked goose breast, apricot jam, honey cake and plum duff.

Delicatessens attracted not only German Americans but also passerbies who were enticed by the windows displaying foreign and ‘fancy’ foods.

As the flood of German immigrants into New York continued into the 1920s, the German delicatessen evolved. Some of the delis began to look less like meat shop and more like restaurants. Although centered in New York, where there were over five thousands delis by the mid 1930s, these institutions quickly spread across the United States.
History of delicatessens in New York

History of bagel in America

Many bagel bakers came to the United States with the mass of eastern European Jewish immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. In the 1890s in the United States only Jews from Eastern Europe ate bagels.

Bagels originated in 1683, when Jewish baker created them as a gift to the reigning Polish king. The round shape was meant to resemble a riding stirrup, bugel in German as riding was the king’s hobby.

Until the mid 1900s, bagels continued to be consumed largely by Jewish Americans, who clung to the bread and its Old World associations even as the immigrant themselves became increasingly assimilated.

Bagels slowly gained popularity but continued to be rare in United States. According to food historian John Mariani, the first mention of bagel in United States was in 1932.

The US bagel industry took off in New York City between 1910 and 1915 with unionization of bagel bakers. In 1907 the International Beigel Baker’s Union was created, joining together three hundred bagel bakers.

The popularity of bagels spread beyond urban centers when Polish baker Harry Lender opened the first bagel plant outside of New York City in 1928 in New Haven, Connecticut. When Murray Lender joined his father’s bagel business in 1955, he started making bagels a mainstream food item by packaging bagels to sell in supermarkets.

In 1984 Kraft purchased Lender’s as a corporate companion for its Philadelphia brand cheese. All over the country, consumers could now buy a totally standardized, mass produced bagel under the Lender’s label.

By the 1990s, Americans were consuming a large quantity of bagels, spending more money on them which was estimated $900 million than on doughnut ($500 million).
Bagel in United States

As bagel chains proliferated throughout the United States, bagels lost their Jewish identity, becoming instead a New York food.
History of bagel in America