A kitchen that worked like a factory
The first hamburger chain, White Castle, opened in Wichita, Kansas, in 1921. At the time many Americans distrusted minced meat, so the restaurants were painted white, kept spotless and had the meat ground where customers could see it. A BURGER cost five cents. The CHEESEBURGER is usually credited to a teenage cook in Pasadena, California, in the mid-1920s.
In 1948 the brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald shut their drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California, and reopened it with a menu of just nine items and a kitchen arranged like a production line, with each worker doing one job. They called it the Speedee Service System, borrowing an idea from car factories; our cars page covers Henry Ford's moving assembly line. A salesman called Ray Kroc visited in 1954 because the brothers had bought eight of his MILKSHAKE mixers, far more than any other restaurant. He went on to turn McDonald's into a worldwide chain.
Ketchup used to be fish sauce
KETCHUP probably comes from a word in a Chinese dialect for a sauce made from fermented fish. British cooks in the 1700s made ketchups from mushrooms, walnuts and oysters, and tomato ketchup only became the usual kind in the 1800s. The Heinz company began making it in 1876. Its famous slogan, 57 varieties, was chosen in 1896 because Henry Heinz liked the number, even though the company already made more than sixty products.
MUSTARD is made from ground seeds, and the heat only appears when the powder meets water. The PICKLE in a burger is a small cucumber soaked in vinegar.
Nuggets, chips, kebabs and hot dogs
Chicken NUGGETS were worked out in the 1950s by Robert C. Baker, a food scientist at Cornell University. The hard part was making minced chicken hold its shape and keeping the batter on through freezing and frying. He never patented the idea. Buffalo WINGS are said to have been first served at the Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, in 1964.
Potatoes cause the most confusion. In Britain thick-cut CHIPS come with fish, and thin ones in a paper bag are FRIES, while a packet of crisps is what Americans call chips. Belgium and France both claim the fried potato. One popular story says American soldiers in Belgium during the First World War tasted them in French-speaking towns and called them French fries.
The KEBAB in a pitta with salad and sauce, as sold late at night across Europe, is usually traced to Berlin in the early 1970s, where Turkish immigrants began serving döner meat in bread so it could be eaten while walking. It became one of Germany's most popular fast foods. The name HOTDOG was in use by the 1890s, when American college magazines joked about what might be in the sausages; the frankfurter itself came over with German immigrants. A soft bun made it something you could eat standing at a baseball game. The rest of the grid, from the COMBO meal with a SODA to ONIONRINGS, a HOTDOG and a SHAKE, is the menu board of any takeaway, and our restaurant jobs page covers the people behind the counter.