I didn’t know until after the fact that May 28 was National Hamburger Day. I didn’t even know there was such a thing until I read about it in the Boston Globe.

If I had known I certainly would have celebrated the event by cooking up hamburgers for supper instead of roasting a chicken.

Hamburgers, with or without cheese, are one of my favorite meals. The wonderful patty shaped ground beef fried, broiled or barbecued is in fact one of America’s favorite meals.

 Though America may be able to take credit for putting the beef patty on a bun as a sandwich, though no one really knows when or where the bun was introduced, it cannot take credit for inventing the hamburger.

Where else would you expect the hamburger to have come from other than Hamburg, Germany. According to Charles Parnadi’s “The Origins Of Everyday Things,” the concept of shredding or grinding beef dates back to the middle-ages in the Mongolian part of Russia. Can you believe that?

Apparently the cattle raised on the barren land of the area produced meat so tough that it couldn’t be eaten without pulling out a few teeth, so it was shredded. Well, they also ate it raw because cooking food had not yet become a common practice, so shredding made good sense.

In the 14th century as some Russians found their way into Germany they introduced the Germans to the raw shredded beef. The Germans loved a good meal and started shredding the beef and adding regional spices. They discovered that cooking the meat made it better, not to mention probably spared the diners a few trips to the bathroom.

The seaport town of Hamburg became known for compressing the shredded meat into patties, which became known as Hamburg steak. Steak is a bit of a stretch, but what the heck, I can’t argue with history.

In the 19 century, Dr. J.H. Salisbury of England liked the shredded beef so much that he advocated shredding all food to aid in digestion, and he thought it was so healthful it should be consumed three times a day and washed down with hot water.

One can only imagine the condition of the arteries of those who followed Dr. Salisbury’s three servings of beef a day.

It’s no surprise that the English dropped the name Hamburg steak in favor of Salisbury steak. My father always said, on those occasions when my mother served Salisbury steak, that it was nothing more than glorified hamburg. I guess he was right after all.

The other significant thing to happen to Hamburg steak was its introduction by German immigrants to America in the 1880s. It was the Americans who changed the name to hamburger steak and eventually to just plain hamburger.

I like to think that a housewife trying to come up with something different for supper added the bun.

What is known is that at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair the hamburger was being served on a bun and was called a hamburger sandwich.

Some 40 years before McDonalds flipped its first burger, the White Castle chain of restaurants put “hamburger” on the menu and the birth and popularity of the fast food hamburger began.

Though I find the history of the hamburger interesting I really don’t care where it began, I only care about where it ended up.

I’m sorry that I missed National Hamburger Day, but the way I see it, I and millions of other Americans will be celebrating the joys of the hamburger all summer.