The gimlet eye - hamburgers - Column

National Review, August 14, 1995 by Andrew Ferguson

"I sing the Burger Electric," Walt Whitman famously wrote, in his famous collection, Burgers of Grass. As every Am. Lit. student knows, the hirsute songster soared to ever higher states of ecstasy as he contemplated the object of his love.

I am mad for the juice, white hot and luscious, the damp bun (I crave the damp bun), the slice of crisp onion also, the sliced crispness atop the quivering patty sits, not as a king sits, there is no hierarchy here, no ordering of fiefdoms and tyrannies, only the processed American-cheese food, melting in the cleavage of the burger, spread-eagled, offers up, it merges in mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, pickle relish! Grease damping my chest hairs I yawp: This is miracle enough.

It was for just such raptures that Emerson, an early mentor of Walt's, dubbed Whitman "the bard of the backyard grill." All right, so sue me, I'm making it all up. Whitman didn't soar into famous raptures in contemplation of the hamburger; he didn't know from hamburger. But if he had known about it you can be sure he would have soared into at least a semi-rapture, and I for one would have been glad of it, for the burger needs a bard. It requires hymns of praise. Here in the humid deeps of summer, the grilled burger holds out for some of us the season's sole consolation. Yet one scans in vain the volumes of American poesy for tributes whose eloquence does justice to the hamburger. The closest I've come -- and it's actually pretty damn close -- is Chuck Berry's immortal lines (which I paraphrase): "I'm so glad to be livin' in the USA / Where hamburgers sizzle on an open griddle night and day."

I treasure these lines because they capture perfectly what I love about the burger-as-concept, which is the commingling of jingoism and cuisine. Burgers are our food; they are American. And they are not "American" in the forced, prissy manner of "new American cuisine," where free-range, steroid-free Santa Fe chicken is seasoned with home-grown spices culled from sagebrush and tumbleweed. This much-celebrated new American cuisine -- hog jowls with cilantro! grits drizzled with tarragon butter! -- is the product of an inferiority complex, a sly emulation of Europeans, whom we take, mistakenly, to be our betters.

It is therefore un-American. The Americanness of burgers lies in precisely the opposite, in their forthrightness, their lack of pretense and pomposity. Burgers are made of flesh ripped from the bone of dumb animals. The flesh is ground in the iron jaws of machines and pressed by human hands into little pucks, then seared by brutal heat. Juices spatter. Traces of blood drip from the chin. Chunks of meat cling to the teeth. It is hard to imagine anything more American.

I don't mean to suggest that burgers don't allow for creativity. My own preparation of burgers has over time taken on the precise maneuvers of a Japanese tea ceremony. At the grocery store I forgo those packages of meat stamped with the little stickers declaiming, "Only 6% fat!" I want fat (I am mad for fat). The fat percentage should be in double digits, into the high twenties if possible. At home I place the beef in a large bowl and sprinkle it with mysterious seasonings. I prepare my grill. I soak wood chips to toss on the coals, generating huge clouds of smoke for an ineffable, if carcinogenic, flavor. I buy the buns specially from a local baker, then toast them to finely measured crispness. And so on.

Does this sound a trifle precious -- almost, dare I say it, European? ("Do I contradict myself?" Whitman famously wrote. "Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I've been eating burgers.") In truth my burger standards are flexible. I won't insist on the wood chips or the seasoning or the covered, smoke-filled grill; in a pinch I'll even settle for McDonald's. Like every burger buff I have my favorite commercially sold burgers, and the best of them are better than mine, for all my exquisite preparations.

Bloomington, Indiana, for example, boasts a hamburger stand called Hinckles, where the burgers are fresh ground daily. Smashed onto the ancient griddle, then flipped by expert hands, they can make a grown man weep. I remember, too, from my days in the Midwest, the great gut bombs and sliders of White Castle. You'd order a sack and when you got home the grease would have soaked through the paper, so that meat and wrapper became indistinguishable, enhancing flavor. I know that nostalgic Englishmen speak wistfully of their favorite fish-and-chip houses for the same soaked-bag effect. But fish are delicate, silvery creatures. White Castle offers grease from hearty animals that can stand motionless for hours in a sylvan pasture, defecating. You tell me which is more impressive.

The one thing I insist on -- and I don't think I'm being unreasonable about this -- is that the burger be made of, well, burger. I once admired Our President for his ability to consume burgers unabashed. You'd hear stories about his eating, about the jalapenos piled on the presidential patty, and melted cheese slathered with mayonnaise, and chopped onions spilling out -- all for a post-jog snack! Recently, however, my colleague Robert Shoffner wrote in The Washingtonian that Bill Clinton has converted to a health-Nazi concoction called "Boca Burger." I will let you read the ingredients while I leave the room: "soy with purified water, potato starch, soy fiber, dehydrated onion, caragoenan (natural extract of an ocean plant), fresh garlic, and malt extract."