At some point, the hamburger evolved from the urschleim of sandwichdom and became its own beast.
If we are to believe that John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, popularized the notion of eating meat between paired slices of bread in the mid-18th century, we may squint and also see the nascent beginnings of what would eventually become the burger.
But in the centuries that followed, the burger has so outpaced its ancestry that can we really call it a sandwich anymore? Clearly it’s speciated into a new creature entirely—it has vast restaurant chains devoted to it and dominates American culinary culture. Meanwhile, there’s a sandwich in a plastic triangle in an airport somewhere wondering what went wrong…