Why Do We Call It A “Hamburger” When It Doesn’t Contain Ham?

The origin of the word “hamburger” has very little to do with pork (unless you're eating a particularly poor-quality “beef” patty). Instead, it traces back to the bustling German port city of Hamburg.

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Nestled in the mouth of the Elbe River, leading to the North Sea, Hamburg was a gateway for European immigrants seeking a new life in America in the 19th century. 

The year of 1848 saw a flurry of revolutions across Europe, prompting millions of people to cross the Atlantic in search of a new life. Many emigrated aboard ships of the Hamburg America Line, a transatlantic shipping company founded in 1847 that linked Europe with numerous ports across the East Coast of the fledgling USA. As these immigrants carried their culture and cuisine to the US, a curious culinary connection emerged.

Hamburger had been used as a way to say a "native of Hamburg" for centuries. It’s not crystal clear how the word became directly intertwined with a minced beef patty served between two pieces of bread, although there are a few theories. The main theory is that the Port of Hamburg had become associated with several high-quality products, one of which was beef. 

"Real Hamburg beef was an expensive gourmet food in the nineteenth century... One common way to prepare fresh Hamburg was to chop it, season it, and form it into patties," Andrew F. Smith writes his 2011 book Hamburger: A Global History.

Somehow, somewhere in the US, this minced beef joined up with the English trend of sandwiching tasty things between two bread slices, Smith explains.

A dish known as “Hamburg steaks” started to appear in published books around the 1880s, although it wasn’t until the first decades of the 20th century that the standalone word “hamburger” started to appear in print.

Through a process of linguistic rebracketing, the latter part of the word – “burger” – eventually became a self-contained term, used to describe a variety of similar sandwiches, from cheeseburgers to veggie burgers and beyond.

It’s a very similar story to how the German city of Frankfurt became the namesake of hot dog sausages, aka frankfurters, as well as wieners, which take their name from Wien, the German name for Vienna.

If you trace the word Hamburg itself, things get even more linguistically tangled. The etymology of the city’s name is linked to “Hammaburg,” a castle built by the highly influential emperor Charlemagne in 808 CE. In Old High German, burg means “fort” or “castle,” while hamma is less certain, but it may mean “bend” or “angle,” possibly referring to the curve of a river or even the “back of the knee.”

In other words, a hamburger means something like “a meaty sandwich from the city with a castle built on the back of a knee”. What a mouthful.