The Great American Hamburger

The All-American Burger

By 6:30 a.m., the grill sizzles at Sioux Sundries in Harrison, Neb., (pop. 279) as Delores Wasserburger takes orders from the breakfast crowd: bacon, eggs, toast, and 2-pound hamburgers. “Sometimes they’re waiting in line for me to open,” says Wasserburger, 66, who has been famous in this cattle country town and beyond for 30 years for her humongous old-fashioned Coffee Burgers, named after local rancher Bill Coffee.

“One day Coffee brought his ranch hands in and he said, ‘Delores, let’s really fill ’em up today.’ So I just kept stacking up the meat.”

A Coffee Burger consists of two 1-pound freshly ground beef patties smothered with six slices of yellow American cheese and tucked slip-sliding into a regular hamburger bun. The old-fashioned burger is served with traditional toppings of lettuce, tomato, onion, and pickles—plus a fistful of napkins to mop the juice that trickles down your wrists and smile.

“We don’t say, ‘Where’s the beef?’” Wasserburger says. “We say ‘Where’s the bun?’”

Hamburger fans from every state and 14 foreign countries have found their way to the variety store and diner combo where Wasserburger sells crocheted dolls and birthday cards up front, and a half ton of hamburgers each month in the back. She signs autographs and poses for pictures. That’s just how it is when folks find the hamburger of their dreams.

Burger bliss can be found across America in homey come-as-you-are places where the hamburgers range in size from teensy 2-ounce Cozy Burgers made since 1922 at the Cozy Inn in Salina, Kan., (pop. 45,679) to Ye Olde 96er (that’s 96 ounces or 6 pounds) at Denny’s Beer Barrel Pub in Clearfield, Pa., (pop. 6,631). With its custom bun and condiments, this world’s largest menu burger weighs up to 9 pounds, measures 16 inches in diameter, and is nearly a foot tall. Owner Dennis Liegey began serving them in 1998 and hasn’t had a diner polish off one of the $24 burgers yet.

“We get football players in here who order it. People call and rent motel rooms here so they can try this burger. We’ve had a tremendous amount of fun with it,” Liegey says.

Regional flavor

What’s under the bun varies as widely as its size. Some hamburger devotees demand them plain; some prefer them piled. And many find their perfect match in the regional version.

“Oh, my goodness, you’ve just got to try one,” Roy Alexander, 74, says about the Guberburger, the hometown favorite brushed with melted peanut butter at the Wheel Inn Drive-in in Sedalia, Mo., (pop. 20,339). It’s been served since the 1950s when an out-of-towner swapped the idea for an order of Susie-Q’s (curly fries).

Alexander cruised the Wheel Inn as a teenager in his 1947 Chevrolet. Since retiring 17 years ago, he’s been hanging out inside the Wheel Inn three times a day.

“It’s just like it was in the 1950s,” he says about the drive-in with its red-and-white checkered floor and red stools planted around a U-shaped counter. Carhops take orders at the car and deliver them on a tray that hangs on the car window.

The favorite hometown burger in El Reno, Okla., (pop. 16,212) is evident with one whiff of downtown. The Route 66 town is famous as the Fried-Onion Hamburger Capital of the World and celebrates its legacy the first Saturday in May with a 750-pound, fried-onion community hamburger.

Three downtown eateries within three blocks serve the regional burgers: Johnnie’s Grill, Robert’s Grill, and Sid’s Diner. In the early 1900s, as many as 14 hamburger stands spiced the frontier town. For this burger, a mound of thinly sliced yellow onions is flattened onto a quarter-pound ball of ground beef and sizzled into the patty.

“It’s a hometown deal and has quite an aroma,” says Steve Galloway, 47, owner of Johnnie’s Grill, in business since 1946. “We used to have one guy who’d fly his helicopter here to get fried-onion burgers.”

Mom-and-pop places

Hamburger hankerers arrive on skis if necessary for a Shooting Star Burger served at Utah’s oldest saloon, the 1879 Shooting Star Saloon in Huntsville (pop. 649). This dream burger includes two beef patties, a split Polish knockwurst, grilled onions, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, and secret spices on a toasted bun. It’s served in a heap of atmosphere.

“Some people come in just to see Buck,” owner Heidi Posnien says. Buck was a 297-pound Saint Bernard dog, the world’s largest, and his head is mounted over one booth and flanked by moose, elk, and bear. The ceiling is plastered with dollar bills signed by customers and the original booth seats are stuffed with horsehair. Customers belly up to the original oak bar while a 1940s jukebox belts out Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash, seven songs for a dollar.

Taverns and mom-and-pop places often serve the best old-fashioned hamburgers, discovered Bill Bunyan, 65, of Dodge City, Kan. (pop. 25,176). The retired history teacher completed his quest last August to eat a hamburger in each of Kansas’ 105 counties.

“The best are rustic places,” Bunyan says. “I ate open-faced chili cheeseburgers at Lizard Lips deli (Toronto, pop. 312) where there’s a tank nearby for (fish) bait. Oh, and in Salina, I was in hog heaven at the Cozy Inn.”

The inn’s miniature Cozy Burgers have been cooked on the same 18-by-36-inch cast-iron grill in the six-stool diner for 82 years. Customers pitched a fit in the 1940s when the owner installed a new grill, so he put the old one back. Other than the price creeping up about a dime a decade, nothing has changed. Most people eat five or six of the 80-cent Cozy Burgers, notes manager Larry Jackson, 46, who savored his first at age 4. He ships frozen batches nationwide to loyal customers.

Jackson daily grinds 90-percent lean beef by hand for the plain and simple recipe: a ball of beef is flattened on the grill and sprinkled with onions, salt and pepper. That’s it.

“An employee got fired once for putting on cheese,” Jackson says.

Which just goes to prove, some people are pretty particular about the way they serve—and eat—the all-American burger.

Hamburger History

Hamburg steak, brought by German immigrants, first appeared on menus in the United States in the 1840s, but just who first transformed it into America’s favorite sandwich—the hamburger—depends on who you ask.

Seymour, Wis., (pop. 3,335), home of the Hamburger Hall of Fame, credits Charlie Nagreen with inventing the hamburger in 1885. Just 15, Nagreen drove his ox-cart concession to the Outagamie County Fair and sold meatballs. He flattened the meatballs and placed them between two slices of bread to make them portable.

The town honors “Hamburger Charlie” at its annual Burger Fest and cooked up the world’s largest hamburger—8,266 pounds—in 2001. This year’s festival is Aug. 7.

Jeff Lassen, owner of Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Conn., continues his family’s tradition of serving the “original” hamburger. In 1900, Louis Lassen filled a customer’s request for a quick meal to be eaten on the run. He sandwiched a broiled beef patty between toast and sent the customer dashing.

Lassen, 43, still uses his great-grandfather’s vertical broilers and prepares the same no-frills burger with daily ground steak—no ketchup or mustard allowed.

“In the old days my father would just throw ’em right out if they asked, but now you’ve got to be a little more tolerant,” Lassen says. “We don’t want to spoil all the quality of the product by throwing that stuff on there.”

Frank Menches, who sold pork sandwiches at his lunch counter in the 1880s in Akron, Ohio, is said to have substituted beef and invented the hamburger. Fletcher Davis of Athens, Texas, (pop. 11,297) also is credited with inventing the hamburger and popularizing it at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.

No one disputes that Walt Anderson and E.W. Ingram founded the first fast-food hamburger restaurant, White Castle, in 1921 in Wichita, Kan., or that Americans ate an estimated 8.2 billion restaurant burgers in 2002—plus the ones they flipped at home.

Marti Attoun is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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