The hamburger’s history reaches back to Hannah Glasse’s 1758 recipe for Hamburg sausage served on toasted bread, and to the Hamburg steak that German sailors brought home from Baltic trade routes. This episode looks at the competing American claims from the 1880s and 1890s, including Charlie Nagreen, the Menches brothers, Louis Lassen and Oscar Weber Bilby, and argues that the burger was really a way to feed a workforce on the move. Fletcher Davis at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair helped make it a national food.

After Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle turned the public against ground beef, White Castle rebuilt trust in 1921 with spotless restaurants, grills in full view of customers, and slider patties with five holes that cook through without being flipped. The McDonald brothers pushed that model further in 1948. We then follow the burger around the world, from Australia’s burger with the lot and India’s vada pav to Danish gravy-covered burgers and East Asian rice burgers, and on to the Big Mac Index, the hundred dollar hamburger, luxury burgers and the $300,000 lab-grown patty unveiled in London in 2013.

• How the Hamburg steak turned into a handheld sandwich
• Rival claims to inventing the hamburger in the 1880s and 1890s
• How White Castle used open kitchens and five-hole sliders to win back trust
• Regional versions from Australia, India, Denmark and East Asia
• The Big Mac Index, fast food inflation and lab-grown meat