Nowadays, in the city of Hamburg as well as in parts of northern Germany this type dish is called Frikadelle, Frikandelle, or Bulette, which is similar to the meatball. The first ancestor of our burger, the frikadellen, was a small seasoned meatball or slider-sized beef patty. So, instead of the ketchupy thousand island dressing, Cincinnati’s hamburger pioneers stuck to the more northeastern and Scandinavian European version of dressing a ground beef patty with a thick creamy, tangy sauce, although by mid century, a refrigerated cold sauce. And the tenderizing or grinding of the meat may have been a necessity of the poor dental hygiene of Europeans who needed soft chews for their decaying teeth. The sour note probably came from a need to cover up off flavors of bad or turning meat long before freezers and mechanical refrigeration. The reason behind the creation of the dishes might not sound all that appetizing. This flavor note travelled with folks as they took the dish from east Prussia to west Germany and north (Scandianavia) to south (northern Germany). And the meats were either pounded to hell and back or ground into soft boiled meatballs. It was a human instinctive flavor note that beef went with sour, creamy, pickled sauces. The grandfather (klopse) and great grandfather (frikadellen) of our American hamburgers were bathed in sour, dilly, pickled cream sauces, before they found buns or brotchen. These predecessors to our American Hamburger circulated around the Nordic trading ports in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Prussia, Poland, and Russia. But if we follow the American Hamburger family tree back to its birthplace in East Prussia, Russia, and Scandinavia, a sour-tangy creamy white sauce is not all that weird. ![]() ![]() Ketchup seems to be the norm for American burgers. ![]() Some may think that our tartar sauce dressed double decker hamburger is weird.
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