cheeseburger

Lionel Sternberger was sixteen years old in 1926, working at his father Charles Sternberger's lunch counter called The Rite Spot on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, California. One afternoon he laid a slice of American cheese on a cooking hamburger patty and watched it melt. He served the result to a customer, who reportedly liked it. The cheeseburger was not a planned invention. It was an idle experiment by a teenager who happened to work a grill.

The Sternberger family's claim was investigated and documented by food historians in the late twentieth century. A rival claim came from O'Dell's restaurant in Louisville, Kentucky, which registered a trademark on the word cheeseburger in 1935. The Rite Spot had no such trademark. The first printed use of the word cheeseburger appeared in 1938 in a Denver, Colorado, restaurant menu published in the Denver Post. That document made the word official in English.

White Castle had been selling hamburgers since 1921, and the hamburger was already a national food before cheese entered the picture. The addition of cheese changed the economics of the dish. Melted American cheese added fat, salt, and a layer of creaminess that bound patty and bun together. Dairy associations noted the opportunity and began promoting cheese on burgers through the 1940s and 1950s, embedding the cheeseburger in American fast food before the major chains arrived.

McDonald's added the cheeseburger to its national menu in 1958. By 1960, it had sold more cheeseburgers than hamburgers. The single slice of American cheese became the default, and the basic cheeseburger, recognizable by description alone to any American, was set. The Rite Spot in Pasadena closed long ago. Its inventor, Lionel Sternberger, was largely forgotten until food historians traced the word back to his grill in the 1990s.