The Power of the Hamburger

A culinary rhapsody

As we got out of the car, Landon proclaimed with the enthusiasm only a fifteen-year-old can muster, “Hamburgers are power!”

We had just arrived at Five Guys Burgers and Fries to celebrate my grandson’s latest achievement, his acceptance into the Conservatory program at Valor Christian High School, where he had just completed his freshman year. In this program, he will have the opportunity to further his mastery of the piano. And so I did the only logical thing; I invited him to share a hamburger meal at Five Guys Burgers and Fries because that is where his adventure with the piano began half his life ago.

Seven years ago I was pondering what to give Landon for Christmas, and his dad told me he had a CD by the Piano Guys he listened to a lot, and maybe he would like more piano music to listen to.. So while he and I were enjoying a burger at Five Guys I brought up the subject of piano music. I asked him if he had any interest in learning how to play the piano. His excited response told me I had hit a wonderful note. So I told him I would lend him my keyboard as long as he took lessons and practiced diligently. Easy enough except for two things: I did not own a keyboard, and I was pretty sure music lessons were not in his parent’s budget.

Soon, however, I acquired a keyboard thanks to our friends at Amazon, and I agreed to subsidize lessons.

Hanging over the archway in our dining room is a ceramic plaque which says:

“Every meal shared in love is a feast.”

As far as I am concerned a meal can be anything from a huge turkey with all the trimmings for Thanksgiving to a simple burger on a bun.

I am especially fond of a good hamburger. I have even been accused of spending my life on a quest for the perfect hamburger, one equal to my childhood favorite. When I was 10 or so, my dad introduced me to Jack Lyon’s Hamburger Stand in Bismarck, my hometown. It is legendary amongst us who grew up there in the first half of the twentieth century. I have never found a burger as good as those served at Jack Lyon’s. My dad always said the secret to a Jack Lyon’s hamburger was the large flat-top that was never cleaned and thus had decades’ worth of grease to flavor each burger. I suspect the secret for me is nostalgia.

A jack Lyon’s burger was served in a narrow hole-in-the-wall establishment that had the aforementioned flat-top griddle behind a stool lined counter. There were no tables. And there were no French fries either. As you sat at the counter, your back was to a narrow aisle that held a pop cooler of a kind I haven’t seen for years. It was a rectangular lidded tub of ice that had strips of metal inside forming channels from which hung long-necked bottles of soft drinks, Coke, Pepsi, Orange Crush.

In the early nineteen-fifties, when I was a regular customer, a burger cost 20 cents, a bottle of pop was a nickel. For 25 cents, you could have a feast. I feasted almost every Saturday, as long as my meagre allowance held out, with the little extra my mother would give me with a wink. My buddies and I had a routine on Saturdays. We would go in the morning to play basketball at the high school gym. If we were lucky enough to have “tennis shoes”, we had an advantage over those who didn’t because they had to play in stocking feet to protect the floor. I was lucky in my high-top black Keds. But I digress. After playing basketball until just about noon, we would walk downtown, about nine or ten blocks, to Jack Lyons, where we would feast. I always had mine the way God intended a hamburger to be, with ketchup, pickle, and raw onion. Though I can’t quote chapter and verse, but I’m sure it’s somewhere in the Bible, probably Leviticus.

After chowing down and arguing the merits of Coke versus Pepsi, we would walk a few more blocks down to Main Avenue and the Dakota Theater where, for twelve cents, we would watch magenta tinted westerns starring Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, or Hopalong Cassidy, and the like. The westerns were usually preceded by a serial episode that kept us coming back week after week because of the previous week’s cliff hanger ending, such adventures as Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers (not related to Roy), and the Perils of Pauline, from which I believe the term cliff hanger comes, as Pauline was once or perhaps many times left at the end of an episode clinging by her fingernails to a cliff. This was our life before television.

But once again I digress. It is hamburgers we were talking about.

The hamburger has an interesting history. It has become America’s greatest contribution to cuisine, vying with pizza as our favorite food. (And just to muddy the waters, isn’t it interesting that we also have hamburger pizza?) Yet, the name itself comes, some say, from Hamburg, Germany, for a popular sandwich made there many moons ago. Others claim, however, that the name comes from Hamburg, New York for the same reason.

There are lots of food items named after places in Germany. My home town of Bismarck shares a name with a jelly filled pastry. (Bismarck is the second name for my hometown, having been changed in the nineteenth century from Edwinton to attract German immigrants to North Dakota). Oops, another digression. I wonder if Bismarck is another name for the same pastry known as a Berliner, which according to an internet search is “ a traditional German doughnut (also known as a krapfen) that is round, filled with jam or custard, and often dusted with powdered sugar. Unlike American donuts, Berliners typically don't have a central hole.” Sounds like a Bismarck to me.

Those of you who are old enough to remember John F. Kennedy will recall when he got a lot of ribbing, when expressing his solidarity with the people of Berlin he declared “Ice bin ein Berliner!”, in effect calling himself a jelly filled doughnut. Fortunately, he was not speaking to the people of Frankfurt and declaring himself to be a hot dog, which, by the way, not a few Americans at the time would have agreed with. Or he could have been in Hamburg, and now we have a digression within a digression which returns to our original topic: the hamburger.

Hamburgers are usually made from ground beef, though there are turkey burgers and lamb burgers, among others. I have never seen a burger made from ham, however.

“What got you onto this rambling about hamburgers?” you might ask. Good question. For the answer, move your eyes to the top of the page and re-read.

And that, my friends, from the Piano Guys to Five Guys, is the power of the hamburger. I wonder if Beethoven and Mozart had favorite hamburger joints in Berlin or elsewhere.

Es lebe der Hamburger! (For you French speakers - Vive les hamburgers!)

The second episode of Spenser’s Choice, in which Spncer shares with family members the dire dictate he has received from the government, will be posted in a day or two for paid subscribers. Thank you for your patience as the muse sometimes dallies.

I look forward to your joining me next time,

Bill Bache Brown, The Fallen-Away English Teacher.