Hamburger Dreams: How Classic Crime Solving Techniques Helped Crack the Case of America's Greatest Culinary Mystery

By Christopher Carosa

Who sold the first hamburger ever?

More than 300 historical footnotes. Competing origin stories. One delicious American mystery.

Everyone knows the hamburger. Almost no one knows where it really came from.

For more than a century, different people and places have claimed credit for selling the first hamburger. Newspapers, historians, institutions, families, fairs-and even popular legend-have helped keep those competing stories alive.

But they can't all be first.

Was it Louis' Lunch in New Haven in 1900, a claim recognized by the Library of Congress?

Was it Fletcher "Old Dave" Davis in Texas in the late 1880s?

Did Charles Nagreen sell the first hamburger at Wisconsin's Outagamie County Fair in 1885?

Or did Charles and Frank Menches beat him to it at the Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York?

And what about the persistent story that the hamburger made its debut at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis?

Silver Book Award winner Hamburger Dreams treats the birth of the hamburger not as another collection of food legends, but as a historical cold case.

Award-winning academic researcher and journalist Christopher Carosa follows the evidence using classic criminal-inquiry techniques, historical records, contemporary accounts, geography, chronology, and the same kind of deductive reasoning made famous by Sherlock Holmes.

The result is a carefully researched investigation into something so simple, so common, and so familiar that almost no one thought to record exactly how it began.

Like a prosecutor presenting a final summation to a jury, Carosa lays out the evidence, tests the famous stories, separates fact from folklore, and lets the case build toward its conclusion.

If you enjoy American history, food history, unsolved mysteries, surprising discoveries, or simply a great hamburger, Hamburger Dreams will take you down a delicious historical rabbit hole.

Think you know who invented the hamburger? Buy Hamburger Dreams, follow the evidence, and decide whether history got it right.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1938465067
• ISBN13: 9781938465062
• Release Date: November 2018
• Publisher: Pandamensional Solutions, Inc.
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 9.0"