History of the Cheeseburger
Cheeseburger is a hamburger with cheese (with other toppings and ingredients). Cheese is placed on a hot patty and its heat melts the cheese. Other ingredients that are often part of a cheeseburger are lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, and ketchup.
AS with the hamburger, we don’t know for sure who invented the cheeseburger. It appeared for the first time and became popular between the late-1920s to mid-1930s. Lionel Sternberger worked at "The Rite Spot", his father’s sandwich shop in Pasadena, California, when he was 16 and one claim is that he invented the first cheeseburger in 1926. One story says that he experimented with different tastes and placed a piece of American cheese on a hot, just prepared, hamburger patty. Other story says that a passing homeless man suggested Lionel to add cheese to hamburgers.
Whichever story is true is not too important because he and his father liked it and placed it on the menu of "The Rite Spot". But because they called it “cheese hamburger” some deny them that they invented the “cheeseburger”. The menu of the restaurant “O'Dell's” in Los Angeles had a cheeseburger in 1928. “O'Dell's” sold it with chili for 25 cents. Steak 'n Shake, a restaurant chain, has a document in its archives that says that its owner, Gus Belt, tried to trademark name “cheeseburger” but was not granted a trademark. “Kaelin's Restaurant” in Louisville, Kentucky claims that they invented cheeseburger in 1934. Unlike Gus Belt, Louis Ballast of the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In in Denver, Colorado managed to trademark the name “cheeseburger” in 1935.
Cheeseburgers can be made to be simple: hot hamburger patty, some type of melting cheese, salad and two halves of a bun. Other can be much more complex. People add bacon, avocado, mushrooms, onions, and (like we mentioned before) chili. There are versions of cheeseburgers with egg, feta cheese, salsa, chili peppers, different types of meat like ham, gyros meat, bologna, anchovies, and different sauces. Cheeseburgers can also be made with more than one patty (usually up to for which are called double, triple, and quadruple) and more than one slice of cheese.
Cheeseburger is generally not kosher because it is made of mixtures of milk and meat (cheese and meat patty.) This makes it unacceptable by people that practice Judaism because their law (Jewish law - Halakha) doesn’t allow eating of food that mix those two things together. This proved as a problem when McDonald's started opening franchises in Jerusalem. They tried to fix that by opening kosher and non-kosher restaurants in Israel. A kosher restaurant in New York City tried to sell kosher cheeseburgers (made of soy cheese) but that proved controversial.
