Want lies with that?

THE HAMBURGER is America's iconic sandwich, a sizzling symbol recognized from China to Peru. With all due respect to the bustling port city of Hamburg, Germany, a dish of chopped or minced beef (which that city's residents, and others, have been eating for centuries) is not the same as the sandwich we think of as the quintessential American invention. And now the perennial question of who invented the hamburger is in the news again. Texas state legislator Betty Brown has introduced a bill to codify the oft-repeated claim that "Fletch" Davis, an Athens, Texas, grill man, created the burger and introduced it to the world at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair.

The Lone Star State's attempt to stake its claim on hamburger history caused an explosive reaction in New Haven, Conn., home of the venerable Louis' Lunch restaurant, which has its own long-standing claim. Other claimants, such as Seymour, Wis., and Hamburg, N.Y., have entered the debate. But none of these claims is persuasive, and the most likely inventor of the hamburger is a person whose name is unknown to most Americans, though we're all familiar with the restaurant he founded.

First, Texas' claim. A small library of food histories has for years been circulating this tale, which was popularized by a Dallas newspaper columnist, Frank Tolbert, in his 1983 book, "Tolbert's Texas." Invariably, they repeat Tolbert's assertion that a reporter for the New York Tribune wrote from the 1904 fair of a new sandwich called a hamburger, "the innovation of a food vendor on the pike." My research assistant, Andrea Murphy, and I have painstakingly looked through the Tribune's archives and can safely say that this report does not exist. Furthermore, there is no Fletcher Davis on the fair's concession list. In fact, we found no documentary evidence for Texas' claim at all.

Louis' Lunch, on the other hand, has a blizzard of clippings and affidavits to support its claim. There is only one problem: the next hamburger Louis' Lunch serves will be its first. The restaurant makes a broiled ground-beef patty that is served on toast. Such a sandwich is, historically and semiotically speaking, not a hamburger. The hamburger as a recognized entity is a ground-beef patty on some form of yeast bun. Can Louis' really claim that nobody ever put ground beef on two slices of bread before? The Earl of Sandwich himself might have done that. In fact, an 1894 article in the Los Angeles Times described a late-night food vendor who sold tamales to drunks -- along with "trotters, ham, egg and hamburger steak sandwiches" --one year before Louis' Lunch was founded.