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.