page_title: Hamburger
section_title: Frank and Charles Menches
hierarchical_section_title: Hamburger / History / Claims of invention / Frank and Charles Menches
caption_attribution_description: A bacon cheeseburger, with lettuce, tomato and ketchup. This cheeseburger came from a diner in Brooklyn, New York.
context_page_description: A hamburger is a sandwich consisting of one or more cooked patties of ground meat, usually beef, placed inside a sliced bread roll or bun. The patty may be pan fried, grilled, smoked or flame broiled. Hamburgers are often served with cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, bacon, or chiles; condiments such as ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, relish, or a "special sauce", often a variation of Thousand Island dressing; and are frequently placed on sesame seed buns. A hamburger topped with cheese is called a cheeseburger.
  The term "burger" can also be applied to the meat patty on its own, especially in the United Kingdom, where the term "patty" is rarely used, or the term can even refer simply to ground beef. Since the term hamburger usually implies beef, for clarity "burger" may be prefixed with the type of meat or meat substitute used, as in beef burger, turkey burger, bison burger, or veggie burger.
  Hamburgers are sold at fast-food restaurants, diners, and specialty and high-end restaurants. There are many international and regional variations of the hamburger.
context_section_description: Frank and Charles Menches claim to have sold a ground beef sandwich at the Erie County Fair in 1885 in Hamburg, New York. During the fair, they ran out of pork sausage for their sandwiches and substituted beef. Kunzog, who spoke to Frank Menches, says they exhausted their supply of sausage, so purchased chopped up beef from a butcher, Andrew Klein. Historian Joseph Streamer wrote that the meat was from Stein's market not Klein's, despite Stein's having sold the market in 1874. The story notes that the name of the hamburger comes from Hamburg, New York not Hamburg, Germany. Frank Menches's obituary in The New York Times states that these events took place at the 1892 Summit County Fair in Akron, Ohio.
caption: A bacon cheeseburger, from a New York City diner
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