Through much of U.S. restaurant history, smells were a problem. Partly this was because of a lack of ventilation that caused the build up of odors of all kinds blended together in a miasma. Then there was also the ideal of the smell-free middle-class dining room where even delicious kitchen aromas were frowned upon. All this kept numbers of people out of restaurants.
Eventually this began to change. Better ventilation was achieved and restaurants learned to use good smells to their advantage, even as a kind of advertising. Today a restaurant owner might even hire an aroma consultant so that they may begin “profiting from pungency”!
Clearly that was exactly what a small Wisconsin drive-in did when the owners developed the “pizza-burger” following the end of World War II. Of course they didn’t hire a consultant, but their new type of hamburger was deliciously smelly in a way that attracted customers.
The sandwich was launched sometime around 1951 by veterans who had returned from the war, got a VA loan and opened a small roadside stand in Muskego WI selling burgers, hot dogs, and frozen custard. Soon it became a drive-in named Big 3 from which the partners launched the pizza-burger. Served on a toasted bun, it was made of ground pork and beef, cheese, chopped onion, and pizza sauce, the latter being the special, secret ingredient.
By 1956 franchises had been sold in every state in the U.S. As with Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken and “Chicken in the Rough,” franchisees bought the right to advertise with the product’s logo – the boy with the freaky nose – and a guarantee that the company would not license competing sellers within a delineated territory. It was not long before the inventors found food producers who bought rights to sell the pizza sauce and the frozen patties, greatly simplifying production for drive-in operators. [above: 1956 advertisement, Washington PA — note “Not a Gimmick”]
Despite the licensing, however, I have no doubt that many eating places around the country that claimed to offer pizza-burgers were not authorized and used their own guesswork recipes. One that I saw incorporated black olives.
The basic sandwich was so popular with teens that a similar one was soon adopted by school cafeterias, although recipes may have varied – greatly. For example, one I found used ground bologna and beef, and substituted spaghetti sauce for the carefully spiced pizza sauce.
The Muskego drive-in, later turned into a full-scale restaurant, is gone. But as of 2004 when the founder’s son was interviewed there were still a couple of places producing pizza-burgers under franchise.
Remarkably, the pizza-burger has been memorialized with a roadside marker.
© Jan Whitaker, 2024
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Restaurant-ing through history 