60 Fun Facts About Hamburger

Which masked McDonaldland character spent decades in black-and-white stripes trying to steal Ronald McDonald's food?

The Hamburglar returned in 2015, when McDonald's brought the character back to help launch a new sirloin burger.

"Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen claimed to have sold the first hamburger at an 1885 county fair in which state?

Wisconsin's Seymour fair is where the 15-year-old is said to have squashed a meatball between bread so customers could eat while they walked. He came back to sell burgers there every year until his death in 1951.

Louis' Lunch, which says it served the first hamburger in 1900, is in which city?

New Haven, Connecticut, is where a rushed customer in 1900 supposedly got steak trimmings between two slices of toast. Louis' Lunch still serves its burgers on toast, cooked in cast-iron grills dating from 1898.

At Louis' Lunch, which claims to have invented the hamburger, asking for which of these is famously forbidden?

Ketchup is out, like every other condiment, because the owners want customers to taste the meat. The founder's family, now in its fourth generation, allows only cheese, tomato and onion as garnish.

At which event was the hamburger called "the innovation of a food vendor on the pike"?

1904 St. Louis World's Fair: a New York Tribune reporter filed the line, and 'the pike' was the fair's midway. The reporter never named the vendor, so nobody can say for sure whose burger it was.

Which state's legislature named Athens, claimant Fletcher Davis's town, the 'Original Home of the Hamburger'?

Texas lawmakers passed the resolution in 2007, backing the tale that Davis, a potter turned cook, was frying burgers at a lunch counter on the courthouse square in the late 1800s.

The Menches brothers said they invented the hamburger in 1885 after running out of which ingredient?

Pork sausage ran short at an 1885 county fair, the brothers said, so they fried ground beef instead and, finding it bland, mixed in coffee and brown sugar.

Which city did Oklahoma's governor proclaim 'The Real Birthplace of the Hamburger' in 1995?

Tulsa got the title on the Bilby family's story that Oscar Bilby served grilled patties on homemade yeast buns on July 4, 1891, which they call the first hamburger on a bun.

White Castle, credited as the first fast-food hamburger chain, opened in 1921 in which city?

Wichita, Kansas, lost its last White Castle in 1938 after the company moved its base east; the chain came home for a single day in 2011 to sell burgers for its 90th birthday.

White Castle patties cook without being flipped because what passes through the five holes punched in each one?

Steam from the pile of onions under the patties does the cooking; Cincinnati grill man Earl Howell dropped the idea in a suggestion box, and the company liked it enough to patent it.

White Castle's tiny square burgers are commonly known by what name?

Sliders, the chain says, got the name for being so easy to eat; it sold the five-cent burgers by the sack, and the word later spread to almost any mini burger.

White Castle co-founder Walt Anderson is credited with which fast-food invention?

The hamburger bun is credited to Anderson, who around 1916 shaped a heavier dough into small squares to fit his patties; he also ran his kitchen like an assembly line, the template for fast food since.

Franchisee Jim Delligatti created the Big Mac in 1967 and first sold it in Uniontown, in which US state?

Pennsylvania was the test market: head office feared a pricier burger would put customers off, so Delligatti trialled it in Uniontown, near Pittsburgh. His reward, he said, was a plaque.

McDonald's credits which head-office employee with the name Big Mac?

An advertising secretary, 21-year-old Esther Glickstein, offered it when an executive rushing to a board meeting asked for ideas; everyone laughed, she said, but it beat Blue Ribbon Burger, and McDonald's only thanked her in 1985.

In McDonald's 1970s Big Mac jingle, which ingredient is sung straight after 'lettuce, cheese'?

Pickles come next, then onions on a sesame-seed bun; the 1974 ads showed real customers fumbling the words, and a 2008 revival in Malaysia gave a free Big Mac to customers who said it within four seconds.

Which publication launched the Big Mac Index as a lighthearted currency test?

The Economist's Pam Woodall devised it to make exchange-rate theory easier to swallow: a burger should cost the same everywhere, so a cheap one hints at an undervalued currency. It gave the world the word 'burgernomics'.

Burger King's 2009 Facebook app swapped a free Whopper for what?

Ten friends had to be deleted, and the app told each one they had been traded for a burger; nearly 234,000 friendships ended before Facebook objected to those notices and Burger King pulled the stunt.

Where was the Whopper Jr. accidentally created in 1963 for lack of Whopper bun moulds?

Puerto Rico's first Burger King opened in Carolina before its Whopper bun moulds had arrived, so manager Luis Arenas-Perez used regular buns; the chain liked the small version enough to sell it worldwide.

For an April Fools' Day prank in 1998, Burger King advertised a Whopper designed for which customers?

Left-handers were promised a Whopper with every condiment rotated 180 degrees in a full-page USA Today ad; the next day thousands asked for one, and others insisted on the right-handed original.

Which 1984 presidential hopeful used Wendy's "Where's the beef?" line in a debate against Gary Hart?

Walter Mondale told Hart his 'new ideas' reminded him of the ad, and won the nomination; the ad's director later joked that had Mondale said the line like Clara Peller, he would have been President.

Dave Thomas named the Wendy's burger chain after which member of his family?

His daughter Melinda, nicknamed Wendy, posed in pigtails for the sign; years later Thomas apologised to her, saying he should have named the chain after himself because of the pressure it put on her.

Fry cook Lionel Sternberger reputedly invented the cheeseburger in 1924 in which California city?

A 1928 menu from O'Dell's in Los Angeles listed a cheeseburger smothered in chili for 25 cents.

Two rival bars in which city claim the Jucy Lucy, a burger with molten cheese sealed inside the patty?

Minneapolis rivals Matt's Bar and the 5-8 Club sit on the same avenue; Matt's says it forgot the 'i' in Juicy back in 1954, and now warns that a correctly spelled one may be a shameless rip-off.

Burger-mooching J. Wellington Wimpy is a character in which comic strip?

Popeye's pal forever promises to pay on Tuesday for a burger today, and in 1934 a real American burger chain borrowed his name.

Britain's Wimpy Bar chain opened its first outlet in 1954 inside a Lyons Corner House in which city?

London's Coventry Street got it as a burger counter inside a traditional restaurant; the American original, founded in 1934, had shrunk to seven outlets by its founder's death in 1977, and the UK offshoot outlasted it.

In Pulp Fiction, Vincent Vega says Paris calls which McDonald's menu item a 'Royale with Cheese'?

Quarter Pounder means nothing in a metric country, Vincent explains, so Paris gets a 'Royale with Cheese'; the real French menu comes close, listing the burger as Le Royal Cheese.

Six cooks built Guinness's heaviest hamburger, a 2017 giant weighing more than a tonne, in which country?

Germany's record-setter, built in the Bavarian village of Pilsting, weighed 1,164 kg and took a crane to move; it only counted once every bite was eaten, so it was sold off as nearly 3,000 ordinary burgers.

Which singer's 'Cheeseburger in Paradise' grew from a craving after canned food at sea?

Jimmy Buffett limped into a Tortola marina with a broken bowsprit after days on canned food and peanut butter, and found a bar selling American cheeseburgers; the overdone one he got, he said, tasted like manna.

An In-N-Out burger ordered "Animal Style" is cooked in a thin layer of which condiment?

Mustard is cooked into the patty on the grill; the off-menu order, which the chain says began with customer requests, also adds extra spread and grilled onions.

In-N-Out's crossed palm trees nod to which treasure-hunt comedy, a favourite of founder Harry Snyder?

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World sends its cast racing for loot buried under palms that form a giant letter; Snyder saw each restaurant as his treasure, so since 1972 most have been marked with a crossed pair.

In-N-Out prints what in small type on the underside of its cups and burger wrappers?

Bible verse citations such as John 3:16 on the soda cups were the idea of Rich Snyder, a founder's son; after his death the chain kept printing them out of respect for him.

Which burger chain, founded in Arlington, Virginia, in 1986, gives out free in-shell peanuts?

Five Guys were Jerry Murrell and his four sons, who were told to start a business or go to college; when a fifth brother was born, the name came to mean the sons alone.

Hamburger Helper went national in August 1971 in response to what?

Soaring beef prices and hard times had families stretching every pound of meat, and the boxed mix promised dinner for five from one pound of hamburger.

The Impossible Burger's meaty "blood" comes from heme based on a molecule from the roots of which plant?

Soy roots carry the molecule in their nodules, but digging up plants was too costly, so Impossible Foods put the soybean gene into yeast and now brews its blood-red heme in vats.

The green chile cheeseburger has its own official tourism trail in which state?

New Mexico's most storied example comes from the Owl Bar, a roadside cafe that opened in 1945 feeding 'prospectors' who were really the atomic scientists preparing the Trinity bomb test nearby.

Japan's MOS Burger introduced which alternative to the bread bun in 1987?

Pressed rice patties, cakes of cooked white rice rather than rice flour, stand in for bread; the chain, which says it tunes its menu to the Japanese palate, calls the Rice Burger a smash hit from launch.

The Japanese chain MOS Burger says its name stands for Mountain, Ocean and what?

Sun completes the trio: the chain says its founder wanted staff as dignified as a mountain, with hearts as broad as the sea and a passion that, like the third, never burns out.

An Australian "burger with the lot" comes with which vegetable topping rarely seen on American burgers?

Beetroot is such a fixture that McDonald's Australia sold a McOz with a slice of it, under the line 'Nothing says Aussie like beetroot in a burger.'

In 2013, crowds queued for hours at a Brooklyn food market for Keizo Shimamoto's burger, whose bun was made of what?

Ramen noodles, packed into two discs, held the patty; each Saturday's batch sold out within hours at Smorgasburg, and imitators appeared before the craze was a year old.

Charles Ranhofer, whose 1894 cookbook The Epicurean included a chopped-beef steak recipe, was chef at which Gilded Age New York restaurant?

Delmonico's chef chopped a pound of tenderloin with kidney suet or marrow, shaped it into four-ounce cakes rolled in breadcrumbs, and fried them in butter; they went to the table under gravy, with no bun in sight.

The USDA wants burgers at 160°F but allows 145°F for what?

Beef steaks can stop at 145°F because any bacteria sit on the surface of a whole cut; grinding, the USDA explains, spreads them all through a patty, so its centre has to reach 160°F.

The first lab-grown beef burger, cooked and eaten at a 2013 press event, cost roughly how much to produce?

$330,000 covered the research at Maastricht University, where cow cells were grown into strips of muscle; tasters found the patty close to meat but not that juicy, and the mystery backer turned out to be Google's Sergey Brin.

Salisbury steak is named for James Salisbury, who promoted a chopped-beef diet as what by profession?

A physician, he treated Union soldiers' chronic diarrhoea during the Civil War with chopped beef and little else, and his 1888 book turned the regimen into an early American fad diet.

Bob Wian sold his car in 1936 to open a California burger stand whose double-decker launched which restaurant chain?

Big Boy took its name and chubby mascot from a young regular at the stand; Wian said the double-decker began as a joke for a customer who wanted something different, and McDonald's later modelled the Big Mac on it.

The steamed cheeseburger, cooked in a steel cabinet, is a speciality almost exclusive to which US state?

It is thought to have been invented at Jack's Lunch in Middletown in the 1920s or 1930s, when steaming was touted as healthier than frying.

Hawaii's loco moco stacks a hamburger patty and a fried egg on white rice, topped with what?

Brown gravy smothers the lot. The story goes that hungry Hilo teenagers asked a local diner around 1949 for something cheap and filling, and the dish took the nickname of one of them: Crazy, or loco in Spanish.

Norm Cox drew the three-line 'hamburger' icon for a 1981 Xerox workstation to resemble what?

A menu list, as it would look once the button was clicked, is what the three lines mimic; Cox says the team joked to early users that it was an air vent to keep the window cool.

Which fictional burger has a secret formula that Plankton spends an entire TV series trying to steal?

Krabby Patty ingredients stay secret, but the show's staff have let one thing slip: Mr. Lawrence, who voices Plankton, says the burger has always been vegetarian, and a producer confirms there is no meat in it.

A&W credits franchisee Dale Mulder with inventing which burger in 1963, at customers' request?

Bacon cheeseburger credit became a selling point: Mulder rose from his Lansing drive-in to run the whole chain, which built a 2014 ad campaign around an 'oral history' of his invention.

The meat "Maharaja Mac", McDonald's Big Mac for India, now uses which patties instead of beef?

Chicken patties fill it, because McDonald's India serves neither beef nor pork, out of respect for Hindu and Muslim diners; a vegetarian Maharaja Mac is sold alongside.

A "$100 hamburger" is slang for an excuse to make a short trip in which pastime?

Private flying makes the burger pricey: pilots joke that a $5 airport-cafe burger costs about $100 once fuel is counted, and by 2008 rising fuel prices had one flight-school boss calling it a $200 hamburger.

In 2015, media in which country hailed a local street snack, meat in a bun, as the first hamburger?

China's outlets were passing on an American claim: a HuffPost food piece had called roujiamo, a Shaanxi street snack it traced to the Qin dynasty, the world's first hamburger, and Chinese media ran with it.

Smash burger lore credits a 1960s Kentucky cook at Dairy Cheer with flattening beef on the griddle using which kitchen item?

A bean can did the smashing, the story goes, but as a first it looks doubtful: burger historian George Motz reckons America's earliest burgers were already balls of beef smashed flat for speed.

Ray Kroc first visited the McDonald brothers' burger stand in 1954 because he was selling them what?

Milkshake mixers were his line, and a single stand that needed eight of them made him curious enough to visit; within a year he had opened his own McDonald's as the brothers' franchise agent.

Which Illinois-born chain took its slogan 'In Sight It Must Be Right' from grinding its beef in front of customers?

Steak 'n Shake founder Gus Belt wanted diners to see what went into a burger: the chain says he wheeled in a barrel of T-bones and sirloins at the busiest hour and ground them in front of the counter.

The butter burger, an Upper Midwest speciality, is the signature item of which chain?

Culver's ButterBurger is not cooked in butter at all: the name comes from lightly buttering the crown of the bun, which co-founder Craig Culver says is just how his mother made burgers.

A 2012 study found the French eat 14 restaurant hamburgers per person a year, second in Europe behind whom?

The British led with 17 apiece; in France, the researchers said, the burger had left fast food behind and moved onto the menus of brasseries and sit-down restaurants.

White Castle moved its headquarters in the 1930s to which Ohio city?

Columbus was more central to the chain's restaurants, Billy Ingram reasoned after buying out his partner in 1933, and the company he moved there is still run from the city by his family.

McDonald's has trained managers since 1961 at a school whose graduates earn a bachelor's degree in what?

Hamburgerology is the degree from Hamburger University, which began in the basement of an Illinois McDonald's in 1961; its Shanghai campus, Bloomberg reported, can be harder to get into than Harvard.

White Castle's founders borrowed how much in 1921 to build the first of their turreted burger stands?

$700 built a turreted stand selling five-cent burgers, and Billy Ingram's fixation on spotless counters did the rest; the chain still sums up its origins as '$700 and an idea'.