Freedom on a bun: An essay on the burger

Photo by Collin Richie

My 8-year-old has it right.

His favorite food isn’t chicken fingers or pepperoni pizza. It’s a warm and juicy hamburger grilled over charcoal and cooked to medium rare. All three major condiments are welcome. So is cheese. And sliced pickles? Keep ’em coming. Onions, lettuce and tomato will come later in his life. For now, this is the way he likes his burgers. We all have that way we like them.

In its pure form, a burger is about as uncomplicated as it gets, a simple A-B-A pattern of bread, meat and bread again interspersed with toppings. But these toppings, and the order in which they’re applied, are left solely up to the discretion of the one holding the plate. And that’s the beauty of this perfectly American dish: It is fundamentally about choice. Dress it up with truffle oil or eat it like a caveman minimalist. It’s wet clay, willing to be reinterpreted, reinvented or preserved. The ritual of dressing it is part of the magic.

Everyone has his or her own formula. My stepmother insists on mayonnaise on both sides of the bun, and I pity the poor line cook that can’t get this right. My uncle loathes ketchup, requiring only raw red onion and mustard. My kids love pickles, but they must be dill. I like to make sure that ketchup and mustard are squirted in the same quadrant so that they fuse and deliver a sweet-tangy punch. Others prefer to do the same with ketchup and mayo to make a kind of on-the-spot remoulade.

Major corporations have placed time and treasure into how best to dress a burger. Rick Newton, the now-retired owner-manager of Jay’s Bar-B-Q on South Sherwood Forest Boulevard (who once worked for Burger King), recently shared with me the formula for Whopper assembly, which he learned in the ’70s at a corporate training. Pickles, mustard and onions were always grouped together and placed on the bottom half of the bun, while mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato were applied to the top. Ketchup was at the buyer’s discretion. Newton deployed this same system at Jay’s in the ’80s, and it’s still the way the restaurant puts together its Hickory Burgers.

Personally, I like a lot of stuff on my burger. Give me crisp lettuce, fresh tomato, grilled onions, mushrooms, jalapenos, pickles of any kind and cheese. I love unpretentious burgers made with fatty chuck and squishy buns, but I also love a fussy slider with imported semisoft cheese and fig preserves. My favorite cut of meat, hands down, is the ground trimmings the butcher at Calandro’s returns to me every Christmas when I ask him to trim our beef tenderloin. The texture is unsurpassed.

But the truth is, I’ve yet to find a burger I didn’t like at least a little, even ones made on the cheap at ballparks or the filler-filled marvels of school cafeterias.

Because, in the end, a burger is an agreeable friend—a reliable buddy whose purpose is to make you happy, and who’ll let you dress it however you see fit.

Maggie Heyn Richardson is author of Hungry for Louisiana, an Omnivore’s Journey and a regular 225 contributor. Visit her at hungryforlouisiana.com and follow her on Twitter at @mhrwriter. 

This essay was published as part of our March 2015 issue’s “Extreme Burgers of the Capital City” cover story. Read more here.