This is my wife’s favorite food, so I will choose my words carefully. You would be hard-pressed to find other cuisine which illustrates the cultural chasm between our culinary experiences and those of the sages.
In the Talmud, meat itself was considered an upper-class food, while legumes were seen as food for the poor (Ketubot 67b). There was no way to make the latter more upscale or to mark down the former. But the hamburger does exactly that: as Josh Ozersky writes in his magisterial book about hamburgers, “Hamburg steak was the cheapest way for the poorest Americans to eat beef.” Even its earliest form – a 1763 book by Hannah Glass, entitled The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy is the earliest mention of the hamburger – was about making cheap, salty meat.
Despite these humble origins, the hamburger can now be found at the swankiest restaurants. The meat itself might be Wagyu, and the toppings can range from the finest smoked meats to truffles or even gold shavings. The sages would be astounded at the sliding scale on which this food can be located. In the Talmud, foods are class-based. You just do not read of rabbis stating that they drink the common beverage, date beer, but only if it is of the single origin variety, brewed locally in Neharda’ah. The jury is out on whether what has happened to the hamburger is a sign of progress.
