HAMBURGER DAY: MC DONALD ALWAYS MORE ITALIAN FOOD

On May 28th in the United States the Hamburger Day is celebrated and of course in Italy it will be the McDonald chain that in Campania, Abruzzo and Puglia has the highest number of customers. Success in the South is due to the politics of the multinational in the southern regions. The search for local products, the Italianisation of sandwiches and food on the menu, the competitions for the best products such as the Piana del Sele organic salads. in short, a McDonald always “slow” rather than “fast” food.

The chosen date – explain the experts of the communication of McDonald’s – it is not by chance since at the end of May, when the beautiful days arrive, the barbecue and grilled meat season opens.
 
Not everyone knows, however, that the most famous sandwich in the world, symbol of gastronomy made in the USA, has much more distant roots. If the first traces date back to Ancient Egypt, when it was consumed in the form of a meatball, it is at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that it makes its way with the name of “hamburg steak” in honor of Hamburg, the city where the steak minced and pressed meat has had a name for the first time. At the time, Hamburg was the most important port in Europe and the sailors who moved along the sea routes exchanged recipes and flavors: it is therefore necessary to the sailors and the German emigrants the arrival in the United States of the ancestor of the hamburger which has become increasingly famous until transformed, thanks to the advent of fast food, into a real modern icon.
 
Symbol of informality – we eat strictly with our hands -, taste and conviviality, the hamburger is the protagonist of unforgettable scenes of cult films like Pulp Fiction and American Beauty, and has received declarations of love from characters like Andy Warhol, Heidi Klum and Joe Bastianich.
 
And when it comes to hamburgers, one can not but link its success to the name of Ray Kroc, who transformed the San Bernardino restaurant owned by the two McDonald brothers into the world’s largest restaurant chain, using the hamburger as a flag. With the opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1955, the first hamburger is sold for a price of 15 cents. The original recipe, which has remained unchanged over time, has become famous all over the world: beef burgers, ketchup, mustard, onion, cucumber and bread.
One of the most curious facts? Surely it concerns the gherkin: one of the most discussed ingredients, in 1958 was removed from the hamburger but a year later, in August 1959, was reintroduced and never deleted from the recipe.
In Italy, the hamburger becomes a cult in the 80s when McDonald’s arrives in the Bel Paese. It was 1986 when the first McDonald’s Italia restaurant was opened, in Rome, in Piazza di Spagna, and then in Milan.
Since then the sandwich has continued to be more and more successful. Suffice it to say that every year in Italy, 34 million McDonald’s hamburgers are sold with Campania, Puglia and Abruzzo at the top of the “hamburger addicted” regions.