The hamburger, a food concept that has been around for a very long time. Originally it was known as Hamburg Steak or "Sausage", a chopped meat patty or roll on a plate, sometimes atop a slice of toasted bread, eaten as you would any other cut of beef. It goes back to the 1740s, at least. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse, first published in 1747, called the dish "sausage"...but that description clearly lays the foundation for a fried patty of ground beef, the succulent precursor to a delicious concoction of bun, beef, lettuce, tomato, onion, and a big kosher pickle...
"Take three pounds of nice pork, fat and lean together, without skin or gristles, chop it as fine as possible, season it with a tea-spoonful of beaten pepper, and two of salt, some sage shred fine, about three-teaspoonfuls; mix it well together, have the guts nicely cleaned, and fill them, or put them down in a pot, so roll them of what size you please, and fry them. Beef makes very good sausages."
An actual patty as we know it seems to have developed in northern Germany towards the end of the 18th-century from sailors who had tasted something similar in their travels across the Baltic to Russia, and likely took the name from Hamburg, Germany's largest port city. In the early 1800's, the dish seems to have come from a heavily salted, minced beef patty, spiced with onions and breadcrumbs, fried or steamed into something more savory, more refined. By the 1830s, Delmonico's in New York lists a "Hamburger Steak" for 10 cents. It wasn't the first iteration of the dish up to that point, but it shows popularity here in America, and must have been very well known before appearing on the menu of such a high-end, 19th-century restaurant.
The "hamburger steak" developed into the hamburger sandwich we know it in a variety of different locations, from a restaurant stand in Connecticut to "open air" fairs in the Midwest, to national events like the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It followed the same pattern as putting sausage into a bun for a more portable and easier to eat food item which became the common "hotdog", the original "fair food" and certainly more palatable than fried "Twinkies" or, God help us, fried "Kool Aid"...
Just The Rite Spot
He was driving his car down Colorado Street in what, at the time, was Pasadena. Lionel C. Sternberger was 20 years old as he pulled up to a local roadside stand known as The Boulevard Stop. There was no stop sign at the intersection known locally as Saint on the Hill...just a corner joint serving up quick hotdogs and sodas. Incidentally, it's the same Colorado which plays host to the annual Rose Parade.
He was a wunderkind, already a business success while still in his teens. Born in New York City, his family moved out to Southern California early enough for him to attend grammar school in Eagle Rock and then high school in Pasadena. By the time he drove up and parked at The Boulevard Stop in 1927, he had opened a series of roadside apple cider and fruit stands, as well as owning a grocery store. After leaving high school, he went back east to try his business luck in Atlantic City, working as an advertising salesman for The Atlantic Times. Apparently this didn't work out so well, because after a year he was back in Pasadena...pulling up into destiny...at a roadside hot dog stand.
The dates on when the The Boulevard Stop was purchased vary. Some sources say 1927, when Lionel was twenty, the plaque commemorating the restaurant's location says 1924, when he was was sixteen, none being definite. During his lifetime he gave a multitude of versions, dates, times, and places. From a 1931 newspaper article on Lionel in The Pasadena Post, he pulled up to The Boulevard Stop in 1927 shortly after returning to California and traded his car to the owner in exchange for the roadside stand. This may or may not be true, but whether it was a car, or cash, or a combination of both, Lionel C. Sternberger was the proud new owner, with a change, renaming it...The Rite Spot.
Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger...
Here is where the story goes in a multitude of directions. In the lore of all things hamburger, Sternberger claims to have created the cheeseburger. Between 1924 and 1928, he said it was invented at The Right Spot and it was called...the "cheese hamburger". To make things more blurry, he is of no help with a definitive creation story due to the multitude of different versions he told over the years.
Refencing a 1931 Pasadena Post article, after purchasing the roadside soda stand business wasn't so good and a grand total profit of two dollars for the day was common. He needed to create something fast, something that would make him money, so he and a friend put a slice of cheese on a lowly, common hamburger. They both tried it, and it was good. The creation met with public success and eventually led to not one, but five locations by the time this article hit the presses.
Another version has a bum coming in begging for food. A hamburger was cooked up for him, a burger with a twist, cheese was put on it. Whether or not the hard-luck customer requested it that way, we will never know, but according to Sternberger, the creation was named the "Aristocratic burger" as a wry turn of phrase...don't forget to collect that $200.00 once you pass "go".
Yet another has him throwing a slab of cheese onto a burger that was burnt, fixing and serving the mistake and turning it into a success. I find this one hard to believe, a burnt burger is a burnt burger, cheese probably wouldn't fix the taste.
And yet another version from 1937 in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin has a customer coming in and suggesting a slice of cheese on the hamburger would make it a "different sandwich altogether".
Whichever story is the right one, The Rite Spot had it, and Sternburger made a fortune from it. In 1937 he sold only two of his Rite Spot restaurants for $150,000, a tremendous sum of money at the height of the Great Depression.
The only one?
Success has many fathers, or so the saying goes. Putting a slice of cheese on an already well known and popular food such as the hamburger is not a great stretch of the imagination for the cook to make. Sternberger indeed made the leap, but hamburgers themselves did not live in a vacuum, likely occurring in other places as well. Lionel C. Sternberger simply made the connection regionally and making that introduction to California. At the time, the United States was not the well-connected country it is today. There was no interstate system allowing persons and information to travel back and forth within a few days...that wouldn't be a reality until the 1950's with the completion of the national highway system. There was no Internet, so ideas that popped up in one city or region probably would remain unknown to the rest of the country. For example, 1934 saw a cheeseburger served by Carl Kaelin in Louisville, Kentucky. 1935 saw the cheeseburger "invented" at the Humpty Dumpty Drive-in in Denver by Louis Ballast, who went so far as to trademark the name, actually calling it a "cheeseburger".
A cheeseburger might have cropped up in places earlier than The Rite Spot, more than likely, but 1927 “looks” to be the first “official” appearance, at least in popular mythology and newsprint.
