Burger Origins
The hamburger is a newer invention than the hotdog. During the middle ages, traveling merchants from Hamburg learned from the Tartars of the Baltic lands how to scrape raw meat and season it with salt, pepper and onion juice for what became known as "Tartar Steak." Many restaurants still serve a similar dish known as "steak tartare."
No one knows the name of the first cook to shape scraped or chopped beef into a patty and broil it, but we do know that the very first hamburgers were browned on the outside and almost raw inside. When the hamburger arrived in the U.S., it was eaten quite raw, the way the French, for instance, still prefer their meat.
The English and Irish were the first to cook their beef patties well done throughout. The English called the burger Salisbury Steak after Dr. James H. Salisbury, who in the 1880s recommended to his patients that they eat well-done beef patties three times daily, with hot water before and after, to relieve colitis, anemia and other illnesses.
You’ll still find Salisbury Steak on many dinner menus beside the hamburger. The difference? Well, many people buy chopped meat frozen in large plastic bags. To prepare hamburger patties, you need a tool like an ice-cream scoop to get the thawed meat from the bag and drop it on pieces of wax paper. The chef then forms the patties by flattening the lumps of chopped meat with a heavy object and making sure they are round in shape. For Salisbury Steak, an oval-shaped object is used to shape the meat patties.
Read more: History Of Hamburgers http://www.kidzworld.com/article/17602-history-of-hamburgers#ixzz2uXAmA9EM