A cultural icon, with cheese

April 11, 2004|By Rick Kogan.

Of the roughly 4,334,876 or so cheeseburgers that have been served at the Billy Goat Tavern since it opened in its subterranean space on Hubbard Street in 1964, none was more celebrated than the one grilled at 12:14 p.m. on April 19, 2003, and consumed seconds later by a young man from New York named George Motz. "It was incredible," says Motz. "It was everything I had heard it was. The taste was distinctive, just a great burger." The 35-year-old Motz knows cheeseburgers and hamburgers in all their artery-clogging, cholesterol-spiking and greasy glory. During the last two and a half years, he has eaten enough to feed a crowd in the Wrigley Field bleachers; eaten them fried, grilled, steamed, broiled, baked and raw; eaten them on buns, rolls, bread and bagels; eaten them plain and covered with butter, bacon, chili, peanut butter, avocados, sauerkraut and almost any other topping that can be concocted by a cook's imagination and whatever might be lying around the kitchen.

He has done this in large cities and in small towns and in out-of-the-way places where there is nothing else but a hamburger joint, travelling across the country in order to select the eight burgers that "star" in his film, "Hamburger America," scheduled for its first screening April 19 at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

"There is no other food that says 'America' like the burger," Motz says. "What I discovered was that hamburgers would be a perfect way to get people talking about the real America, about real family values. These places are bastions of an America that most people don't see, that many have forgotten even exists."

The film, wisely, does not rate the burgers. Nor does it attempt to tackle the tricky question of who invented the hamburger. "You'll hear a million answers to that one," says Motz.

The origins of ground beef can be traced to--and stop reading now if you are in the middle of a meal--those nomadic Mongolian and Tartar warriors who, fond of the taste of raw steak, tenderized their meat by placing it under the saddles of their horses while riding into battle. But the person or persons responsible for the hamburger's creation is difficult to determine.

Of those "million answers" Motz talks about, the most credible are that the hamburger was invented by:

Frank and Charles Menches, brothers from Ohio who traveled a county fair circuit. One day in 1895, they ran out of the pork they had been selling and substituted ground beef, which they called hamburger after the town they were in, Hamburg, N.Y.

Or by Otto Kuasw, a cook in a waterfront restaurant in Hamburg, Germany, who in 1891 started serving thin patties of beef sausage topped by a fried egg and placed between two slices of bread.

Or by Fletcher Davis, an Athens, Texas, cafe owner who, backed by some local businessmen, set up a burger stand at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and thus gained national attention for the new sandwich.

Or by a relative of one of the subjects of Motz's film, Kenneth Lassen, who operates Louis' Lunch in New Haven, Conn. "My grandfather Louis invented the steak sandwich and as a byproduct he made the first hamburgers in the United States," says Lassen. "Both of those things took place in 1900, five years after we opened."

Or, according to the folks who run the Hamburger Hall of Fame in Seymour, Wis., by native son Charles Nagreen who, as a 15-year-old selling meatballs at a county fair in 1895, realized that they were difficult to eat while strolling and so flattened the meatballs, slapped them between slices of bread and . . . .

Does it really matter? How often do you wonder who invented the wheel when you're driving? Do you ever think about the Wright brothers when you're flying?

"Let's just say that whoever invented the hamburger changed the course of history," says Motz.

That's a bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but with all due respect to vegetarians, vegans and the members of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, hamburgers are, as one writer referred to them, "a cultural icon . . . a meaty, multifaceted phenomenon."

That writer, Jeffrey Tennyson, also wrote in his 1995 book, "Hamburger Heaven: The Illustrated History of the Hamburger": "Hamburgers are the one thing that unites us as a people, as Americans, uniquely American."

Some other writers, such as novelist Tom Robbins, can get loony on the subject, as when he wrote: "A hamburger is warm and fragrant and juicy. A hamburger is soft and non-threatening. It personifies the Great Mother herself who has nourished us from the beginning."

According to the National Beef Cattlemen's Association, more than 8 billion burgers were served in U.S. restaurants in 2003, ranging from a high of nearly 800 million in June to 573 million in February, averaging out to about 674 million servings per month. Burgers account for four out of every 10 restaurant sandwiches consumed throughout the country.