The idea of adding a filling to slices of bread dates from the 18th century. Except it was actually invented the other way around.

The sandwich has been named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, since 1765. That was a nobleman who preferred to eat sandwiches so that he could play cards without soiling his fingers on the fat from the meat. He was essentially using the bread as an edible napkin.

The meat was finely chopped for centuries, using not knives, but specially-made chisels. It was a very slow business. But in Victorian times, a grinding (also known as a mincing) machine was invented. This took large pieces of raw meat, and forced them into the machine using a screw that was turned by hand. The meat was chopped into small pieces by knives that rotated at the end of the machine. The finely chopped meat was then pushed through a die with holes in, so that it came out as long shreds of meat, or minced meat or ground meat, depending on what you want to call it. That is the kind of meat used today, although it is now ground using large electrically-powered machines rather than it being done by hand.

So, over the centuries, ground meat and meat between slices of bread had been invented, but they had not come together to make the hamburger. The food, that people came to call a ‘hamburger steak’ was simply a ball of ground beef, often served on a plate and covered with gravy, eaten alongside slices of bread. It was more like meatballs. It had not been made into a sandwich. Furthermore, it was sold raw, not cooked and it was part of the breakfast menu.

The burger had to wait until meat was more readily available. Meat had always been expensive, so for most people, buying a meat dish was out of the question. The grinder made it easier, and therefore faster and cheaper to prepare the hamburger steak, but it was still expensive. But things were to change when the Great Plains region of the United States (land west of Chicago) was opened up to ranching. A huge amount of beef was suddenly available and this made it cheaper. And the new railway made it possible to get the beef to markets far away. What this meant was that beef was cheap enough for Working Class people to buy meat where before they had had to make do with vegetable stews.

So how did the hamburger come to be invented? Well, we now have the idea of ground-up meat which could be fashioned into easily-eaten shapes. We have the cost going down so that many people could afford it. There were already ‘fast foods’ available, such as pork pies and pasties, designed as one handful of food that Working Class people could take to work in the factories. But these foods were all eaten cold. Hamburgers do not taste nice cold.

So the hamburger was not invented for the factory worker. Rather it was invented as a one hand meal at places where it could be served hot‚ such as at fairgrounds or at markets or by the roadside. It was a street seller’s invention. At the end of the 19th century it was still being sold round as a meatball. But people had to eat it at the seller’s stall. Flattening the meatball out to make a patty and then putting the patty between two pieces of a sliced bun meant it could be handled‚ just as the Earl of Sandwich had done two centuries before. And it was, of course, known as a sandwich, even in America. It is still known as a sandwich in America even though the bread is in the form of a bun.

The bun‚ a round piece of soft bread dough‚ was invented around the turn of the 20th century specifically to make it easier for the patty to be held. It was thicker than slices of bread and so could hold the patty and vegetables more easily. And above all, it was hand-shaped.