In 1930, the University of Minnesota carried out an experiment. A student was put on a diet of nothing but hamburgers and water for 13 weeks and his health was monitored. Sound familiar? Well, yes, but the result was surprising to those of us who have seen the film Supersize Me, in which Morgan Spurlock's liver turns to paté after 30 days on a McDonald's-only diet. The 1930 experiment reached different conclusions, claiming that at the end of 13 weeks the subject was in perfect health. This may or may not have been connected with the fact that the experiment was arranged by White Castle, purveyors of the five-cent burger.

This is one of many striking details in Josh Ozersky's quirky history of the burger. What makes his approach fresh is that he tries to recapture the magic of this meat sandwich in the days before BSE, McLibel and Fast Food Nation. Ozersky, a New York food writer, pictures the burger as a “robust, succulent spheroid of fresh ground beef, the birthright of red-blooded citizens”. But the key, he argues, was the bun. There had been many precursors to the hamburger in American cuisine (“a Hamburg steak sandwich, a meatball sandwich...a patty melt”), but none had been served in a slightly enriched, custom-shaped bun. It was this package, according to Ozersky, that provided Americans with “the most concentrated way a person can cheaply eat everything people like about beef”.

Nobody knows for sure when the first hamburger was eaten. The first person to mass-produce them, however, was EW “Billy” Ingram, the maverick behind the 1920s chain White Castle. Their burgers were square patties (so that they could fill up every inch of the griddle), cooked en masse using “custom spatulas”. You could buy them by the sack, but they were also marketed as a glamorous food to hostesses, who were urged to serve them alongside stuffed olives and Boston cream pie.

The story moves from White Castle in the 1920s through McDonald's in the 1940s to Burger King in the 1950s. In the years of post-war prosperity, the thin square patties of White Castle no longer seemed so thrilling. People wanted something bigger. They wanted the Whopper, first marketed by Burger King in 1957. At the time, it seemed excessive (29 cents as against a regular 15-cent burger) but it was nothing compared to the recent gourmet burgers of New York, some garnished with foie gras and truffles, selling for $50 or more. In Ozersky's words, this is yet more proof that the burger has become “the most powerful food object in the industrialised world”.

Ozersky has a hyperbolic style, which helps his book zip along like a well-oiled drive-thru. Sometimes, though, he is OTT. A White Castle burger, he says, is “as artfully self-contained as a Homeric hexameter”, adding that the bun and the burger speak “of their symbiosis in the language of circumferential geometry”. Come again?

There is, though, plenty to relish in Ozersky's monograph, and his enthusiasm comes into its own when he is contemplating the weird power of McDonald's. He shows how the company's Ray Kroc - the Napoleon of the 20th-century food industry - founded his imperial ambitions on a 1.6oz patty, a 1 inch slice of pickle and a “pillowy” white bun. “On the strength of a small sandwich composed of beef and bread, an economic empire was built upon which the sun never sets.

The Hamburger by Josh Ozersky

Yale £14.99 pp147

Times Recommends

• The Sunday Times 100 best holiday reads
• What will we be reading this summer: the booksellers predict
• Literary festivals: a survivor’s guide