When you ask people what they think of when you mention American cuisine, the most popular answer in the hamburger. It has now become a highly popular dish in its own right in Britain. But what is the history of this food icon?

The first mention of a burger in history is in the time of Genghis Khan and his Mongol riders, the Golden Horde as they conquered village after village across Asia. The riders stashed the raw meat under their saddles before riding. After they had ridden each day, the pounded meat would be tender enough to eat raw. So the Golden Horde conquered Asia by eating hamburgers.

The next evolution of the hamburger in history didn’t come until around five hundred years later. In the book The art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse names the prototype for the hamburger the Hamburg Sausage. The recipe says the minced beef be seasoned with suet, pepper, gloves, nutmeg, garlic, wine vinegar, bay salt, red wine and rum. The Hamburg Sausage should then be smoked in the chimney for a week before being eaten.

A hundred years later, German emigrants sailed on the Hamburg-America Line and ate a minced, salted beefsteak. The Germans borrowed the recipe from the Russians and became known as the Hamburg Steak in American and eventually went mainstream throughout the nation.

In 1885, two brothers, Frank and Charles Menches were running low of pork at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York. The Menches chose to serve ground-beef sandwiches instead and later claimed to have invented the hamburger. Except so did a 15-year old boy called Charlie Nagreen who delivered similar sandwiches at the Outagamie County Fair that same year.

The Library of Congress in America, officially credits Louis Lassen of Louis’ Lunch in New Haven for selling the first hamburgers in the USA. He served ground beef cooked on a vertical boiler and sandwiched on two slices of toasts. Four years later in 1904, the hamburger made its national debut at the St Louis World’s Fair.

Since then the hamburger has gone on to have World famous acclaim. Around the World today, the burger, particularly the hamburger is feasted on every day in many different restaurants, takeaways and in thousands of homes. Butchers created their own burgers for sale by using burger presses and meat mincers. Despite many other types of burgers becoming available, hamburger are still the most famous and popular ones around.