DURING MY FIRST year at Yale College, my classmates and I were each assigned a third-year student to help us acclimatise. Nick, my elder and guide, majored in a young academic discipline called American Studies - a blend of popular culture, history, literature and political science of the United States.

It was Nick's job to check in on this freshman occasionally, and it was my bit of good fortune that Nick was well versed in New Haven lore and willing to show me its sights. On a brisk Connecticut afternoon he took me to Louis' Lunch, a low-slung, brick eatery on Crown Street that claimed to have served the first hamburger. Once we got past Louis' shuttered doors, Nick and I grabbed the last two seats on the tiny wooden counter carved richly with the names of former diners. It felt as if we had entered the ancestral home of the White Castle burger, Big Mac, Whopper, Bob's Big Boy Double-Decker, and the Wimpy Classic.

Between bites, Nick explained the beauty of Louis' hand-formed beef patties broiled on vertical cast-iron grills (circa 1895) and served between two slices of white toast with cheese, tomato and onion, but never ketchup or mustard-contaminants.

Now then, how do I reckon that according to The Hamburger, written by Josh Ozersky, also known as “Mr Cutlets”, and the author of Meat Me in Manhattan: A Carnivore's Guide to New York, that Louis' Lunch does not in fact serve hamburgers at all?

Mr Cutlets argues: “There is just one problem. The next hamburger Louis' Lunch serves will be its first... Louis serves a ground beef sandwich on sliced bread, in this case toast. And that is not a hamburger. A hamburger - unlike a Hamburg steak sandwich, a meatball sandwich, a meatloaf sandwich, a patty melt, the German Frikadelle, or a thousand other conceivable variations - is defined by its being served on a bun... Toast, as at Louis', is a stopgap measure that no one ever bothered to imitate.

“No, there is no doubt: on any kind of semantic or platonic level, no bun = no burger. There has always been ground meat, and there have always been sandwiches, the earl and his publicity machine notwithstanding. But for almost its entire existence, a hamburger has meant ground beef served on a bun. To admit ground beef on toast as a hamburger is to make the idea of a ‘hamburger' so loose, so abstract, so semiotically promiscuous as to have no meaning.”

So, there you have it. Since it may be, ahem, morally compromising to stray from Ozersky's definition, Louis' sandwich remains a tasty antique, but sans bun, it is no burger.

The Hamburger - a prime text worthy of inclusion in any self-respecting American Studies syllabus - is the ultimate history of this iconic yet humble meal and America's most famous culinary export. In five amusing and beautifully researched chapters, Ozersky enlightens us with the genesis, commodification and transport of the singular (or double) beef patty on a bun, and he plays the biographer to the personalities making up the “Hamburger Mount Rushmore” - Walter Anderson (White Castle), Billy Ingram (White Castle), Ray Kroc (McDonald's), and Dave Thomas (Wendy's) and their colorful compatriots.

Mr Cutlets expounds on the meaning of the hamburger then and now, America and beyond, and he bravely extends its cultural metaphors. Ozersky has thought deeply about the hamburger, its heritage, symbolic value and future. Putting aside his personal feelings and life's work, he also legitimises the claims made by the hamburger's enemies - the environmentalists and critics of fast-food businesses. “Thanks to an infinite appetite for the world's most popular sandwich, the hamburger covers a multitude of sins.”

Ozersky's work concludes with exhaustive endnotes and a solid index, yet with nary a recipe for a proper hamburger nor a patty's optimum ratio of beef to fat. The reader is warned that it is not that kind of book. But The Hamburger is also not a hifalutin disquisition to be shelved beside your dusty copy of Brillat-Savarin. With his scholar's eye and enthusiast's love, Ozersky does something novel and savoury with the hamburger: he takes care to tell its story with integrity, and what a treat it is.

The Hamburger by Josh Ozersky
Yale, £14.99; 160 pp Buy the book here

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist