In the spirit of Monday’s word, barbecue, let us briefly examine a closely associated meat-word, namely, hamburger. Yes, I know, chicken can be barbequed too (along with hotdogs and pretty much anything else) and it is, perhaps more symbolic of the BBQ tradition (especially in our nation’s southern realms), but bear with me.

For, you see, a Hamburger is actually a native of Hamburg, Germany. Oh yes, I’m quite serious.  As the Oxford English Dictionary brings to our attention, the February 1737 edition of London Magazine noted, in a headline, “Of the City of Hamburgh, with several Observations on the Hamburghers, and other Germans” (sic), hamburger was a proper noun long before it became a greasy common one.

But, that all changed in America, as many food-related things are wont to do.

Hamburger gradually dropped its uppercase “h” after German immigrants brought their “Hamburg steak” sausage recipes to the United States in the 1800s. Again, the ever-helpful Oxford English Dictionary is quick to chime in with this definition: “: a dish composed of flat balls of meat-like fillets, made of chopped lean beef, mixed with beaten eggs, chopped onions and seasoning, and fried.”

OK, that’s still not quite our American idea of a burger, but, in time, some enterprising cook slapped that meat patty between two slices of bread, and, voila! The hamburger was born; to read more about its sizzling history, check out this link (or this one).

Incidentally, steak comes from Old Norse word steik, and hence from the Swedish word stek (and the Danish word steg), which share a cognate, steikja, meaning, “to roast on a spit” (as the OED points out); how very BBQ-like!

In a bit of a local Washington state claims-to-fame, the first use of “hamburger” to refer to, well, a hamburger, came in a story in the  Jan. 5, 1889 issue of the Walla Walla Union Bulletin: “You are asked if you will have ‘porkchopbeefsteakhamandegghamburgersteakorliverandbacon.’”

A little more gruesomely, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) used the word to describe how Lt. Frederic Henry, the primary protagonist in his 1929 A Farewell to Arms, got wounded in the legs, “They had the look of not too freshly ground hamburger steak.”

Ouch. That’s not exactly my idea of a BBQ, but nonetheless, I hope you found this little post on the origins of hamburger interesting.

Look for more such posts each week here on the Daily blog, especially my condensed online words on Wednesdays when I don’t appear in print, of which today’s post is a sort of model. If you have any word ideas or questions, please send them to me at features@dailyuw.com.