A cheeseburger is a hamburger topped with cheese. Traditionally, the slice of cheese is placed on top of the meat patty, but the burger can include many variations in structure, ingredients, and composition. The cheese is normally added to the cooking hamburger patty shortly before serving, which allows the cheese to melt. As with other hamburgers, a cheeseburger may include toppings, such as lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, mustard, mayonnaise, ketchup, or bacon; examples of less common toppings might be spinach or olives.
In fast food restaurants, the cheese used is normally processed cheese, but essentially any other meltable cheeses may be used—common examples include cheddar, Swiss, mozzarella, blue cheese, and pepper jack. Very soft/wet cheeses that melt poorly—like cream cheese, cottage cheese, or ricotta—are very unusual, and very hard/dry cheeses like Parmigiano-Reggiano (or its imitation, "parmesan") would rarely be used in quantities sufficient to be a recognizable topping as opposed to a seasoning.
By the late nineteenth century, the opening of the vast grasslands of the Great Plains to cattle ranching had made it possible for every American to enjoy beef almost daily. Hamburger was one of the cheapest way for even the poorest of Americans to eat beef.Adding cheese to hamburgers became popular in the late-1920s to mid-1930s, and there are several competing claims as to who created the first cheeseburger. Lionel Sternberger is reputed to have introduced the cheeseburger in 1926 at the age of 16 when he was working as a fry cook at his father's Pasadena, California sandwich shop, "The Rite Spot", and "experimentally dropped a slab of American cheese on a sizzling hamburger.
An early example of the cheeseburger appearing on a menu is a 1928 menu for the Los Angeles restaurant O'Dell's which listed a cheeseburger smothered with chili for 25 cents.
The steamed cheeseburger, a variation almost exclusively served in central Connecticut, is believed to have been invented at a restaurant called Jack’s Lunch in Middletown, Connecticut, in the 1930s.
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