When the hamburger made the bun

Incredibly soft, doughy, sweet, and sometimes covered in sesame seeds; served warm and able to soak up the meat’s juices. The hamburger bun is all this and perhaps more due to its capacity for triggering distant memories that range from the first 1980s chains to [SI1] modern hamburger joints.

The bun is the “home” of the hamburger, a term used first to indicate the beef patty and then, due to a culinary metonymy, the entire sandwich.

The origin of the bun as we know it is still disputed and is doubly tied to that of the hamburger. In fact, can a beef patty served on another kind of bread be considered a true hamburger?

BUN OR NOT BUN: IS IT A REAL HAMBURGER?

A philosophical issue of no little account if you consider that in the US this debate has been going on for years and is nowhere near over. Those who maintain that the invention of the hamburger can be attributed to Texan Fletcher Davis from Athens, must admit that the first hamburger bread was nothing more than two slices of simple toasted bread, similar to our current sandwich bread, between which the famous patty was placed. Davis first served this in his café in 1880, before ultimately presenting it, almost two decades later, at the St. Louis World’s Fair.

Another school of thought says that the hamburger originated in Tulsa, Oklahoma, during the 4th of July celebrations of 1891, thanks to the genius idea of Oscar Weber Bilby who decided to serve it not between two slices of bread, but rather inside a soft, sweet roll prepared by his wife.

It may not have been exactly a bun, but it came very close. Meanwhile, the third option takes us to Wichita, Kansas, at the very start of WWI. This is where, in 1916, Walter Anderson decided to a serve a hamburger on the kind of bun that is now commonly used. Most importantly, however, Anderson is credited with standardizing the pairing of the patty and the bread, something which characterizes the hamburger more than anything else.

A WORLD OF BUN 

Did you get all that? Well, the bun actually has (a lot) more to tell us. First of all regarding its origins and variety. The bun is, in fact, a type of bread – usually small, round, and often sweet – that exists all around the world in different forms.  You’ll find it in Beijing known as baozi, or in the Welsh countryside on Good Friday in the form of a sweet (hot cross bun), or even in Mexico on November 2nd where it is known as “pan de los muertos” [bread of the dead]. 

These days it’s hard to find the archetypal bun, though many historians believe that it can be identified in the Roman panis ac perna which could be considered the ancestor of our rosetta with cooked ham: a sandwich so popular that a street in Rome, Panisperna, was named for it.

Yet today this bread is even more famous thanks to a group of scientists who, between the 20th century and now, changed the laws of world physics. In the mid 1980s the rosetta, the Roman version of the Viennese Kaisersemmel, was used to replace the sesame bun (which then returned a few years later) of the Whopper, the large sandwich which helped  Burger King make its fortune. Just another cycle in the history of bread.

FROM THE FDA TO CARTOONS 

Today the hamburger bun is regulated by the American FDA which indicates its specific requirements in article 21CFR136.110 of the Code of Federal Regulations. This is a proper institutional acknowledgement for the bun which we Europeans initially became familiar with through a cartoon character.

In fact, before Burghy and McDonald’s, the hamburger first arrived in movie theaters, becoming an object of desire thanks to Popeye and especially his friend Wimpy. Any one of us would be lucky to find someone who looks at us the way Wimpy looked at his hamburger. 

AN ITALIAN BUN 

There is, however, an interesting Italian story connected to the bun, that of quite possibly the first hamburger chain established in our country: M**Bun, inaugurated in Rivoli in 2009.

In the Piedmont dialect, “bun” does not indicate the bread, but can be simply translated with “buono”, or “good”. Meanwhile, in place of the M**, there was once “Mac”, which in the Piedmont dialect means “alone”. This name led to a clash between the Piedmont-based establishment and the most famous hamburger giant in the world, a case which was broadcast across all of the primary Italian media channels and beyond and actually paved the way for many small hamburger joints to open.

In these little restaurants, which have become incredibly popular in recent years, the bun is often interpreted through the logic of local production chains, as is the case for the Turin-based M**Bun, which, for its bread, uses flour from wheat grown in Piedmont according to the dictates of integrated farming. Another story within a story in the history of the most famous sandwich in the world.