You want fries with that

In the 1950s, my Midwestern grandfather built a "cook shack," as he called it, to recapture his young manhood as a (failed) homesteader in Alberta, Canada. It was enclosed on only three sides and equipped with a wood-burning range, which itself was fitted out with innumerable chambers, vessels, doors, lids, and vents, and a griddle so smooth and seasoned it felt like silk. On summer and autumn Sundays, he picked corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers from his garden, and fired up the range to make baking-powder biscuits and hamburgers. These were the manly, homesteading jobs. My grandmother supplied store-bought buns, ketchup, and mustard, and her own baked beans, Jell-O salad (de rigueur), dill and bread-and-butter pickles, "dilly beans," and rhubarb cobbler. I still think of this as the perfect American meal, not least because when my parents took us off to Ireland it was impossible to re-create and the memory of it became one with homesickness.

Abroad, my mother put all her powers of invention into re-creating the American hamburger, having arcane discussions with butchers on "mince" (the Irish term for ground beef) and interrogating grocers on varieties of flour. She kept a log of her experiments in baking a satisfactory bun and finally called the venture a success. And, except that Irish ketchup tasted "funny," it was.

I have been led to contemplate the meaning of all this fuss about hamburgers by having just read Josh Ozersky's "Hamburger: A History" (Yale University, $22), a short, utterly brilliant chronicle of this storied American morsel. I now realize how historically inaccurate this whole rugged hamburger deal was: My grandfather would no more have eaten hamburgers on the range in the 1910s than he would Jell-O salad. And I see, too, how historically determined it was that he would embrace them in the 1950s. He was, after all, a Republican. I have also been brought even further to ponder something one simply knows but rarely examines: why a hamburger served between two slices of bread is such an egregious violation of order.

There has been a great deal of baloney, if one may so put it, published about the origin of the hamburger, and as perhaps you recall, the industry celebrated one of the burger's specious 100th anniversaries in 2004. Ozersky debunks all of it, and gives pride of place to Walter Anderson, a fry cook who, in 1916, systemized the process and standardized the product that became the White Castle hamburger. When Billy Ingram came in as his partner in the 1920s, a paradigm shift was underway. There may indeed have been privately created hamburgers before this, but it is the commercial, mass-produced hamburger on a bun, so clean, reliable, and portable, that came "at the world as an irrepressible economic and cultural force."

The bun is the "key to Anderson's masterpiece," Ozersky says. "It was the bun that gave the hamburger its mobility; that allowed a person to eat it while walking or (more important) while driving; it was the bun that made it special, that separated it from all other sandwiches and gave it a brandable identity."

The changes that the hamburger reflected and, in time, wrought itself are truly astounding. The burger's proliferation was made possible at all by the opening of the prairie to cattle raising and the rise and dominion of the meatpacking industry, and its total beefiness was ensured by US Department of Agriculture regulation, connived at by the beef industry, which held that a hamburger had to be made of nothing but beef and beef fat and that "even the slightest bit of pork or pork fat disqualified it," as Ozersky puts it, "from the dignity of being called hamburger." Indeed, beef and "the beef dream" unseated pork as America's number-one meat. The despoliation of the environment, especially in South America, by cattle raising is noted later by Ozersky, but let us return to the burger's halcyon days.

The hamburger's natural habitat was provided by the expansion of the highway system and the on-the-go, automotive lifestyle. It was "the perfect food to eat while driving, merrily dialing the steering wheel with one hand while holding the burger in the other, eyes firmly focused on the road to come." But while the highway gave the hamburger its up-to-the-minute cachet, the Cold War lent it brawny, patriotic associations. This is where we return briefly to the private sphere, to the backyard barbecue grills and fireplaces - and that Republican cook shack - that proliferated in the 1950s. Outdoor cooking meant independence, abundance, and manliness American style. The hamburger in this context was, Ozersky observes, "a nonpareil icon of easy abundance, and a loaded one at that, when pointed at the lands behind the Iron Curtain, where people (it was imagined) had to survive on gray porridge and they could shoot you for laughing in bed." We'll leave it there, though Ozersky himself brings the story on to the brothers McDonald, Ray Kroc, the hamburger wars, and down to today, briskly, astutely, and engagingly.

Hamburgers barely exist in "America Eats!: On the Road With the WPA - The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin Feasts That Define Real American Food," by Pat Willard (Bloomsbury, $25.99). The book consists of a selection of wonderful descriptions and vignettes of American group eating - the food and its preparation, and the social life and customs surrounding it - written by members of the Federal Writers' Project in the late 1930s and early '40s. To this, the author has added her own thoughtful accounts as she travels across the land to discover present incarnations of those earlier feasts, a pilgrimage so grueling, it seems, that she ends up thinking New Bedford is in Rhode Island.

The FWP writers really go to town on their material, summoning character and plot and making the preparation of a big feed as exciting as a horse race. ("With all the women frogging out their arms at their work, I knew it would be impossible for the noodles to dry in the kitchen.") Occasional recipes are supplied, including some for those great American gallimaufries, Brunswick stew, booya, and burgoo ("800 pounds of soup meat / 4 dozen squirrels, if in season"). The book includes many photographs of groaning boards and festivities, and a particularly marvelous one that speaks to my soul: It is of a proprietorial and righteous old party at the Gonzales (Texas) County Fair standing before a display of her preserves between two signs that say "Hands Off."

Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net.