Think of “American food” and there’s a good chance you will visualize a hamburger, French fries and a milk shake. But why? Why have chopped beefcakes on buns paired with strings of fried potatoes and ice cream puréed with milk and syrup become the iconic symbols of what Americans eat?
From the mom-and-pop soda fountains and diners of the 1950s through the rise of fast-food chains and even into the current era of premium ingredients and increasingly frequent nods to nutrition, those three foods have survived as the epitome of the American diet.
“It’s the ultimate classic combination,” says Tim Gorman, director of marketing for Lake Forest, Calif.-based Johnny Rockets, a nearly 200-unit chain built on burgers, fries and shakes.
A juicy hamburger topped with cool, crisp lettuce, a fresh tomato slice, melted cheese, hot fries—all those flavors go together so well, he says. Add a cooling milk shake, and “it’s like having your dessert with your meal,” he adds. “How much more indulgent can you get than that?”
The average Johnny Rockets unit serves more than 70,000 hamburgers, 50,000 orders of fries and 25,000 milk shakes each year, largely in their classic forms, Gorman notes.
Although there are more than a million ways to customize the chain’s burgers, Gorman says the original hamburger is the most popular. Of the 20 varieties of milk shakes—including a seasonal pumpkin spice cake tested this past autumn and a “Big Apple Shake” with puréed apple pie in it—35 percent of shakes sold are chocolate, followed by vanilla and strawberry.
Twenty percent of the fries, which the chain calls “American fries” instead of French ones, have chili or cheese on them, but the remaining 80 percent are served ready for salt, ketchup and nothing else, Gorman says.
Today, the hamburger might seem like an obvious representation of this country:A straightforward, honest union of the beef and wheat that built America. But it was no foregone conclusion 87 years ago, when the first White Castle opened, setting up the model for a standardized portable meal.
Indeed, during the early years of the republic beef was not even the obvious choice as America’s signature meat, says Josh Ozersky, whose book “The Hamburger: A History” will be published in March by Yale University Press.
“If one were taking bets, circa 1850, as to what would eventually become the iconic American food, only a Nostradamus could have predicted that it would be made of beef,” he writes. “Pork was the American meat par excellence, and it was consumed on such a scale, and with such voracious appetite, that visitors frequently commented on it.”
The development of large cattle herds on the Great Plains, coupled with the connection of Chicago meatpackers to the East Coast by refrigerated rail cars in the 1880s, changed all that, Ozersky says.
In the Old World, beef had been a luxury. In the United States it was abundant, and that was a source of American pride, he adds.
The chopped beef cooked in butter and served with gravy known as “Hamburg steak” evolved into the similar Salisbury steak, but the leap that made the hamburger unique—and capable of becoming a national symbol, Ozersky argues—was the placing of that beef patty not between sliced bread or toast, which would get soaked through by the patty’s juices, but on a bun.
“Almost its entire existence, a hamburger has meant ground beef served on a bun,” Ozersky says. “To admit ground beef on toast as a hamburger is to make the idea of a ‘hamburger’ so loose, so abstract, so semiotically promiscuous as to have no meaning.”
But Ozersky says that what really lodged hamburgers firmly in the hearts of the American zeitgeist was their mass production, first accomplished by White Castle.
A product of the unbridled consumerism and love of standardization of the 1920s, “White Castle … was built on full-throated propaganda,” Ozersky writes.
Today, the Columbus, Ohio-based chain has about 400 units.
White Castle founder Billy Ingram standardized a thin, onion-speckled hamburger on an enriched white bun.
“By 1927 a standard White Castle restaurant was an exquisite machine, dynamically engineered to allow one man to sell coffee and hamburgers, supremely efficient and gleaming with chrome and white enamel,” Ozersky says in his book. “Built of 149 pieces of steel … it was mobile, fire resistant, and as self-contained as Skylab.”
Next, the McDonald brothers further streamlined the process. Ozersky says they developed a lever-operated device that dispensed the perfect patty at one pull as well as one-squirt dispensers for condiments and bigger griddles.
Ray Kroc saw a money-making machine in the McDonald brothers’ concept and would buy and expand it. But Andy Smith, whose book “Hamburgers: A Global History,” is slated to be published by Reaktion Books in August, explains that Kroc was in a different line of work at the time.
He paid a call on the McDonald brothers in San Bernardino, Calif., in an attempt to sell them milk shake machines.
Smith says milk shakes gained popularity during Prohibition as a nonalcoholic treat. Kroc had married into a milk shake-machine sales company, he explains, noting that Dairy Queen, another early seller of hamburgers, was his biggest customer.
French fries actually were the last member to join the all-American meal triumvirate, Smith explains. Meat shortages during the Second World War led to White Castle adding them to their menu, he says.
McDonald’s had experimented with them as early as the 1930s, “but the equipment wasn’t good enough,” Smith says, and there were a number of employee accidents. Post-World War II technology resulted in better equipment, allowing McDonald’s French fries to be the chain’s “real signature product,” he adds.
But it was not just a series of historical moments that led to burgers, fries and shakes becoming the American meal. They also taste good together.
David Kamen, a professor of culinary arts at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., and an expert in the physiology of taste, points out that the flavors in that meal complement each other.
French fries are hot, fatty and salty, while ketchup, sweet, cold and acidic, balances those tastes, he notes. Hamburgers are juicy, fatty and a bit mushy. Lettuce is crispy. So are onions. “The milk shake gives you creamy sweetness,” he adds.
The meal also has proven to be imminently adaptable and resistant to its detractors. Hamburgers went bunless briefly during the low-carb craze, but their popularity did not flag.
French fry sales dipped a bit when fast-food chains took them off of their dollar menus, but they did not suffer when fears of acrylamide—a potential carcinogen in fried potatoes—came briefly to the fore, nor when the trans fats in the oils used to fry them came under fire.
Ina Pinkney, chef-owner of Ina’s in Chicago, saw sales of fried chicken drop amid trans fat fears, but not sales of fries, and once she announced that her frying oil was trans-fat free, French fry sales rose by 20 percent.
Burgers, fries and shakes continue to adjust to the times, and Dino Lambridis has developed a new generation of these three classic items for his Evos chain.
He says the burgers at the five-unit Tampa, Fla.-based chain are baked to avoid health threats he sees from the hetero-cyclic amines that develop when grilling. So are the fries. The meat in the burgers comes from grass-finished beef. The lowfat milk shakes, developed in-house, are just 180 calories. The burger is 400 calories, an order of fries is 230 calories.
