The origins of the hamburger and the “Duitse Biefstuk”

Because I grew up in a part of the world far from the USA, in a country where we had never heard of a hamburger unless it was a denizen of the city of Hamburg, it was not until I was about 21 when I was acquainted with my first American “hamburger”.
This memorable event took place in the seaside town of Long Beach California. I was an apprentice mate on a Holland America Line ship and we were berthed in Wilmington not far from the resort town. We had been to the big fun fair for which it was famous and when we became hungry, we sauntered into an eating place which some of our American friends would call an “Eatery”. There, I observed a lady with lips as red as Count Dracula’s after one of his nocturnal feasts, devouring a hamburger in a bun with a dexterity which was truly amazing. To my memory, hamburgers - the bun as well as the patty - where much bigger and certainly tastier at the time than they are now and to use a word fashionable among present day American teenagers, it was awesome to see how this young woman, holding the affair with both hands, was able to wrap her gaping mouth around the meat, the lettuce leaves, the relish, the tomato ketchup and the sesame bun, without making a total mess of her make-up and that while she was carrying on a spirited conversation with her male companion.
It is quite obvious that the origin of the name “ham-burger” is derived from the port city of Hamburg in Northwest Germany. Chop-ped meat is of course a most ancient dish, probably even going back to the cavemen whose teeth - I assume - were in ruins by the time they were 25 and the tough mammoth or sabre tiger steaks had to be tenderised. The easiest solution was to chop it up or beat it to smithereens (in the middle ages this was called “smite it to gobbits” and “ram’m up”). Mixed with flavourings, it became the “Steak Tartar”, “Bifteck Americain” or “Salisbury Steak” of modern times. Later on people started to cook the minced meat and the common meatball was born now widely produced in different versions all over the world.
Hamburg once enjoined great prosperity because of trade with the Baltic provinces of Russia where - I read this somewhere - shredded raw meat (steak Tartar) enjoys great popularity. One of my sources says that it was from that time onwards that the Hamburgers enjoyed their meatballs, raw or cooked. Personally I don’t think that it was necessary to import the idea of meatballs from the Baltic, as most other countries had thought of this themselves without the help of the Letts, Latvians and Poles. The so called “Frikadel”, a cooked meatball, is eaten all over Germany and even in Holland although during my life time a “Frikadel” has become some kind of sausage without a casing in my country and the original “Frikadel”, the round meatball, is referred to as a “Gehakt Bal” (in Indonesia the local version of the meatball is amazingly still called a “Perkadel”).
At the end of the nineteenth century, during the heydays of the European immigration to the New World, the majority of the ships carrying the impoverished Europeans came from the port of Hamburg. They were not only Germans but Poles, people from the Baltic states and even from Eastern European countries like Hungary, the Ukraine and even Georgia. With them they brought their own cuisine and, unavoidable, their meatballs. With the usual ease in which most Americans deal with problems of geography, language and origin of things, they called the European meatballs collectively Ham-burgers because it was written on the stern of the ship that the home port of this motley crowd was Hamburg.
Credit should be given to the Americans for putting the lowly meatball into a sesame bun, smother it with a kind of chutney, add sweet tomato ketchup and turn it into the world’s most favourite snack. I have to eat my words of about twenty five years ago when I predicted that the American fast food industry never would succeed in Asia, as the Asians have so many of their own fast food snacks, like noodles for instance. Wrong!! Why is beyond me, but the mostly inferior thin patties of meat - and what else? - doused with tomato ketchup, sweet, and often quite revolting, have become the favourite food of not only the Western teenager but also that of the younger generation of wealthy Thais and Thai Chinese.
My experiences with the regional hamburger outlets are limited and not very encouraging to say the least. The best hamburger I had in recent years was on the poop deck of the Queen Elisabeth II when visiting some friends some years ago while the liner was on the roads of Pattaya. It seems to have been made of real meat without adulteration and smelled lovely of beef fat. To add sauces or relish was left to our own preference. On another occasion an American friend expressed a craving for a hamburger while we were in Kuta, on the south coast of Bali.
We went into an outlet, famous as the “Home of the Whopper”. Three of us ordered a regular hamburger, pre-wrapped in plastic or wax paper and heated in a microwave oven. My friend ordered the “Whopper”. According to my Miriam Webster’s dictionary a Whopper is: “1. Something unusually large or otherwise extreme of its kind”, or “2. An extravagant or monstrous lie.” I will leave it to the readers what interpretation to use. All I can say that none of us finished the “thing” which seemed to be mostly bran or something equally unap-petising.
On another occasion we had to go to the market in Bangkok and, having left Pattaya early in the morning without having breakfast, we decided to give the other big name hamburger joint a try. We both had the ordinary version again which cost, I recall, something like 54 Baht a piece. Granted this is cheap but one can have two bowls of soup noodles for that and get change. The “delicacy” was again wrapped up in wax paper, hot from the microwave. Tomato ketchup was already added to the tiny patty which was of an unidentifiable nature, again strongly suggesting bran, oat meal or even saw dust, soggy, sweet and quite nauseating.
American friends assure me that the hamburgers in the US are much superior but what puzzles me is why the local youngsters go for these abominations in favour of their own fast food.