"Beavers used to be the size of bears."
"A giraffe can lick its eyebrows."
"You share your birthday with nine million other people."
It wasn’t the beer that was talking, or the Fijian artesian water. It was the "Snapple." You learn much dining at Louis’ Lunch, the most famous restaurant in Connecticut, if not, the whole of the United States. Amongst other things, its drinks have educational caps.
You can learn much from the inside of a bottle cap. Like a duck’s quack doesn’t echo. A banana is a giant herb. And a fish can drown. The top of a "Snapple" Diet Peach Tea taught me that one brow wrinkle is the result of two hundred thousand frowns.
Every day, Louis’ Lunch is full of random and occasionally controversial facts. But most people don’t go there for the trivia. They go there for a piece of lovingly pulverised meat and a lot of history, because it's reported that this is the birthplace of the burger…
Home of the American Hamburger
New Haven’s Crown Street is a mustard-free zone. Mayonnaise is prohibited and ketchup is a Grade A banned substance. It may not wreck lives but it wrecks hamburgers. Connecticut is famous for Yale University (1701) and the oldest building in town is the Connecticut Hall, going back to 1850.
But, as well as being "The Nutmeg State", New England’s most southernly state named after the Indian for "long tidal River", is the birthplace of the Frisbee, Charles Goodyear, two presidential Bushes, Charles Dow (of the Index), Uncle Tom’s Cabin author, Harriet Beecher Stowe (she was born in Litchfield and died in Hartford), and it’s where the automatic pistol was invented (Samuel Colt died in Hartford in 1862 and is buried in the city’s Cedar Hill cemetery); the Winchester Repeating Rifle Co was head-quartered there.
Connecticut is also the undisputed home of the all-American hamburger.
Mark Twain may have lived here from 1874-1891 in Victorian Gothic comfort at 351 Farmington Avenue in Hartford (you can visit the Mark Twain House and Museum), but Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) in its billiard room, is the state’s second favourite son.
According to American gastronomic legend, in 1900 a frantically famished man popped into Louis Lassen’s diner and demanded to be fed immediately. He didn’t have time to be seated. Louis, a Danish immigrant who had set up a wagon to feed the local factory workers, rustled him up a broiled beef patty and slipped it between two slices of toast. Although White Castle has unsubstantiated claims to be the first fast food restaurant, the "Lunch" was perhaps the world’s first "order to go", "takeaway" and "carry out."
A History Lesson
Many people and even more locations claim to have invented the burger. Hamburger Otto Klause said he did to feed German sailors. But can it be real burger if it had an egg on top?
Charlie Nageen, a fifteen-year-old from Seymour, Wisconsin, claimed he was the true inventor after mashing up meatballs and inserting the spread between bread for people to eat while walking around at the local fair.
The Menches brothers from Akron, Ohio insisted the burger was their idea after they ran out of sausages and improvised with ground meat.
Many believe they were the first to think of flattening meat and shoving it between a dissected bap. But no one can prove it. Which means that you can look down at your hamburger anywhere in the world and know that’s its origin is unknown.
The hamburger may have been born in Hamburg, New York or even Mongolia. The burger’s pre-history, so burger-ologists believe, goes back to Genghis Khan whose cavalry kept meat strips in their saddles. They were cooked by the horse’s body heat. One pony could feed one hundred warriors. In the 13th century, Genghis’s great grandson Kublai Khan introduced steak tartare to Moscow. German immigrants may have brought the idea from Europe.
Allegedly, the Earl of Sandwich came up with the sandwich in the 18th century, so he wouldn’t get greasy fingers playing cards. Meat grinders were invented in St Louis in the late 19th century. A 10c “Hamburger steak” (breaded minced beef) appears on a menu from San Francisco’s Clipper Restaurant in the 1870s, as it did at Delmonico’s, New York.
One of the oldest hamburger stand photos is probably of Old Dave’s in Athens, Texas in 1904. Fletcher Davis sold burger-esque objects at the St Louis Fair the same year.
The history of the cheeseburger is much easier to trace. Although The Rite Spot in Pasadena, California and Kaelin’s in Louisville, Kentucky both staked claims, there is no disputing that the first trademark for the cheeseburger was awarded to the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In in Denver, Colorado in 1935.
The hot dog, the other iconic street finger food, is even easier to provenance. In the 1870s, German immigrant, Charles Feltman from Coney Island, New York came up with the ingenuous idea of pairing a frankfurter with bread rolls. The name derives from the German’s love of dog sausages.
Walt Anderson from Wichita, Kansas is thought to be the brains behind onion rings. But no one has ever officially patented the hamburger. Although the US’s Library of Congress has declared that Louis Lassen should be the rightful owner.
And therefore, Connecticut should be feted. And pilgrimages made.
The Louis' Lunch Experience
Louis’s great-grandson is now in charge. The hamburgers Jeff Lassen serves have changed little from their historic prototype. Each one is made from chuck and sirloin and ground freshly each day, broiled vertically in cast iron grills (circa 1898, St Louis) and served between two squares of toasted Pepperidge Farm white bread. Cheese, tomato or onion are the accepted garnish. No true connoisseur would consider masking the classic taste with anything else. No regular would ever be caught red-handed using ketchup or caught in possession of illicit condiments. Adulterating the delicacy with pickle or relish is considered a sin. The sign of a heathen.
The sign inside the restaurant with its red shuttered façade is grounded in good taste: "This is not Burger King. You don't get it your way. You can take it my way, or you don't get the damn thing!"
Ketchup (which probably derives from the Chinese sauce "koechip" or brine of fish sauce) is a dirty word among the Lassens. "We feel ketchup ruins the taste because the beef is so good," explained Jeff, curling his lip in contempt.
The waitress brought my $6.25 hand-shaped burger. "Chow down!" she smiled, meaning – "Tuck in." She didn’t body search me for gherkins. The restaurant is not licensed. The original premises, on the site of a tannery, were on Meadow Street near Union station. It moved to its present location in 1975. To help in the reconstruction friends, supporters and hamburger fans sent thousands of bricks from around the globe. Each one has a special place in the owner’s heart. He gives guided whistle-stop tours around his walls.
"I have had bricks sent to me from Australia, England, Japan and the Middle East," says Lassen. "This place is a bit of American history. This is where it all started. This is where the all-American hamburger was conceived."
Curiously the first pizza parlour to open in the United States was also in New Haven and Pepe's Pizzeria Napoletana is still there too. Italian immigrant Frank Pepe opened his first restaurant in 1925 pioneering thin-crust pizzas cooked in coal-fired brick ovens. The restaurant moved to its current location on Wooster Street in the 1930s.
You get a side order of culinary history eating in Louis’ Lunch. You learn that the first McDonald’s opened in Monrovia, California in 1937, the first McDonald’s chain restaurant was opened in Chicago in 1955. And the first Big Mac was served in Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1967 costing 45c.
And that Americans consume 58 million burgers each year. The biggest commercially available burger is served at Mallie’s Sports Bar & Grill. It weighs in at 185.6lbs and costs £399 a la carte. And £2000 to go.
But Louis’ Lunch is the burger’s spiritual home. And a place of pilgrimage. "Everything OK?" enquired Jeff, wiping his hands on his apron. I said everything was fine. That I had much to digest.
The person on the next table was on the Grapeade. There were empty bottles of Pink Lemonade in front of her. And several discarded "Snapple" caps. She read one.
"Did you know that a polar bear can smell a seal from 20 miles away?" Her friend opened another bottle and read, "Goats have rectangular pupils." I refrained from letting them know that twit is a technical term for a pregnant goldfish. I was on the non-alcoholic Fruit Punch.
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