According to hamburger scholar George Motz, the origins of America’s most popular sandwich can be traced to 13th-century Mongolia, where Mongls and Tatars were battling for primacy.
“Apparently, the Tatars had a taste for raw mutton,” Motz told CNN in 2022.
“They would ride all day long with raw mutton under their saddles. When they finally set up camp, they would take this raw, warm mutton, chop it up, probably add some spices or something, and eat it that way.”
In case you’re wondering, yes, this saddle-finished Tatar culinary innnovation led to the French word tartare (“chopped fine, served raw”), describing meat one wouldn’t expect to eat at McDonald’s any time soon—but why eat at McDonald’s, any time?
Fast forwarding a few centuries, the Tatar dish reached Germany via trading through Hanseatic League ports on the Baltic Sea. Raw mutton was discarded, to be replaced by chopped and cooked beef, known to us as frikadellen.
However, Germany was not the final destination for this wandering culinary treat.
Motz explained that as German migrants waited for their ships (to America), they ate frikadellen as a cheap and tasty meal option. When they left Hamburg for the US in the mid-19th century, migrants brought knowledge of the dish with them.
And the rest is history.
The frikadellen meant nothing to most people who were living in the US unless you were German. So they had to change the name at that point to ‘steak in the style of Hamburg,’ or simply, Hambu …
