Beef up your burger

NEW YORK — The hamburger may — or may not — be 100 this year, but there's no disputing America's favorite sandwich has grown up.

Liberated by the high-protein, low-carb diet craze, the burger, once the domain of fast-food joints and backyard barbecues, has stepped out onto the food scene with pizazz. This year's Oscar winners dined on In-N-Out Burgers at a black-tie Academy Awards party. Four-star chefs feature it on their menus, and snappily designed burger shops have proliferated.

"The American palate has grown up over the last 20 years," said Dave Zino, acting director of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association's culinary center. "(Consumers) are looking for bold flavors."

For the home cook looking to expand his or her repertoire, three cookbooks celebrating the versatility of the burger were published in the past few months:

• "Burgers: 50 Recipes Celebrating an American Classic" by Rebecca Bent with Tom Steele. (Clarkson Potter, 2004, $16.95).

• ''Great Burgers" by Bob Sloan (Chronicle Books, 2004, $14.95).

• "Burgers Every Way" by Emily Haft Bloom (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 2004, $19.95).

"It's the iconic American sandwich, really, the definitive American food," Bloom said, interviewed recently. "On any given day millions of Americans are eating burgers — even if you're not eating beef."

All three books begin with the classic beef burger and explore all its variations. The authors also offer chicken, lamb, turkey, veal and fish options.

Basically, Bloom said, "Anything you can bind together from vegetables to Kobe beef is a burger."

The hamburger might be accepted as an American invention, but ground beef has been around at least since the Mongols in the 13th century softened it under their horses' saddles, eating the tenderized meat raw. In the 1600s, German sailors returned to port in Hamburg with steak tartare — raw ground beef with egg and spices — from Russia, called it Hamburg steak and ate it raw or cooked. As early as 1834, the Hamburg steak appeared on the menu at Delmonico's, one of the fanciest restaurants in New York City at the time.

The hamburger's history becomes murkier when ground beef met bread. There are at least four claims to creating the first hamburger sandwich. But the moment that the hamburger garnered national attention is generally accepted as being in 1904 at the St. Louis World's Fair. That's where Davis Fletcher of Austin, Texas, served his version and received glowing reviews from newspapers as far away as New York.