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Where Hamburgers Began—and How They Became an Iconic American Food

By: Nate Barksdale

Updated: January 6, 2021 | Original: August 29, 2014

The hamburger is one of the world’s most popular foods, with nearly 50 billion served up annually in the United States alone. Although the humble beef-patty-on-a-bun is technically not much more than 100 years old, it's part of a far greater lineage, linking American businessmen, World War II soldiers, German political refugees, medieval traders and Neolithic farmers. 

READ MORE: Why Do Humans Eat Meat?

Ground Beef Comes to America

The groundwork for the ground-beef sandwich was laid with the domestication of cattle (in Mesopotamia around 10,000 years ago), and with the growth of Hamburg, Germany, as an independent trading city in the 12th century, where beef delicacies were popular. 

Jump ahead to 1848, when political revolutions shook the 39 states of the German Confederation, spurring an increase in German immigration to the United States. With German people came German food: beer gardens flourished in American cities, while butchers offered a panoply of traditional meat preparations. Because Hamburg was known as an exporter of high-quality beef, restaurants began offering a “Hamburg-style” chopped steak.

In mid-19th-century America, preparations of raw beef that had been chopped, chipped, ground or scraped were a common prescription for digestive issues. After a New York doctor, James H. Salisbury suggested in 1867 that cooked beef patties might be just as healthy, cooks and physicians alike quickly adopted the “Salisbury Steak”. Around the same time, the first popular meat grinders for home use became widely available (Salisbury endorsed one called the American Chopper) setting the stage for an explosion of readily available ground beef.

WATCH: Full episodes of  The Food That Built America  online now. New episodes premiere Sundays at 9/8c on HISTORY.

The Hamburger Becomes a Fast Food Staple

The hamburger seems to have made its jump from plate to bun in the last decades of the 19th century, though the site of this transformation is highly contested. Lunch wagons, fair stands and roadside restaurants in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Ohio, New York and Texas have all been put forward as possible sites of the hamburger’s birth. Whatever its genesis, the burger-on-a-bun found its first wide audience at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, which also introduced millions of Americans to new foods ranging from waffle ice cream cones and cotton candy to peanut butter and iced tea.

Two years later, though, disaster struck in the form of Upton Sinclair’s journalistic novel The Jungle , which detailed the unsavory side of the American meatpacking industry. Industrial ground beef was easy to adulterate with fillers, preservatives and meat scraps, and the hamburger became a prime suspect.

The hamburger might have remained on the seamier margins of American cuisine were it not for the vision of Edgar “Billy” Ingram and Walter Anderson, who opened their first White Castle restaurant in Kansas in 1921. Sheathed inside and out in gleaming porcelain and stainless steel, White Castle countered hamburger meat’s low reputation by becoming bastions of cleanliness, health and hygiene (Ingram even commissioned a medical school study to show the health benefits of hamburgers). His system, which included on-premise meat grinding, worked well and was the inspiration for other national hamburger chains founded in the boom years after World War II: McDonald’s and In-N-Out Burger (both founded in 1948), Burger King (1954) and Wendy’s (1969).

Led by McDonald’s (and helped by the introduction abroad of U.S. hamburger culture by millions of members of the American armed services during World War II), the hamburger—and American-style franchised fast-food—soon spread globally . 

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Who invented the hamburger? Biting into the messy history of America’s iconic sandwich.

Hamburger history is dripping with lies.

One popular story goes that in 1900 a customer walked into Louis’ Lunch in New Haven, Conn., and asked for something he could eat on the go. Owner Louis Lassen improvised by giving him a patty of the restaurant’s steak trimmings between two pieces of toast. The customer got his carryout lunch, and the world got the hamburger sandwich.

The story has been repeated many times by Connecticut and national publications, but I have recently found proof it is not true.

Lassen may well have conceived of his sandwich on the spur of the moment, but at that point many U.S. businesses were serving hamburgers.

Beefy burger recipes, from classic to creative

In January I wrote a story that raised questions about Louis’ Lunch’s standing as the birthplace of the hamburger. However, I was not able to definitively disprove the claim. After the story ran, a reader named Thomas Pieragostini emailed me a link to a series of ads that appeared in the Shiner Gazette in Texas in the spring of 1894 that advertised “hamburger steak sandwiches” being served at a local saloon.

This early burger reference inspired me to dig deeper, and I have since found more than a dozen newspaper references to hamburgers in the 1890s, including in Virginia, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, California and Hawaii. These findings debunk the Louis’ Lunch claim and suggest other burger origin stories are not true, either. In Wisconsin, many claim the burger was invented by Charlie Nagreen, who purportedly sold a meatball between two slices of bread at an 1885 fair in Seymour. In Athens, Tex., the title of “hamburger creator” is bestowed upon Fletcher Davis, who supposedly came up with it in the 1880s. Other burger origin stories can be found in New York, Oklahoma and elsewhere, but they lack documentation.

It turns out chopped meat served between or inside bread is nearly as ancient as civilization.

“A first-century A.D. Roman cookbook by Apicius has a recipe in it that is suspiciously close to the modern burger, a minced meat patty blended with crushed nuts and heavily spiced and cooked,” says George Motz, a filmmaker and author who has researched burger history extensively.

In the mid-1700s, “The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy” by Hannah Glasse carried a “Hamburgh sausages” recipe, which was served on toasted bread. In Germany, a meat patty on bread called Rundstück Warm was popular by at least 1869.

8 Memorial Day grilling recipes to kick off cookout season

But the true precursor to the burger we know today seems to be an inexpensive dish called hamburger steak, which began appearing on American menus in the early 1870s. (A menu, allegedly from Delmonico’s in New York City in 1834, listed the dish. It was eventually exposed as a fake.)

These minced beef and onion patties were served on a plate, not bread, and took their name from choice cows raised in the countryside around Hamburg that supposedly provided the beef. Originally, the meat was minced by hand, but as meat grinders became more available in the late 1800s, so did hamburger steaks. By the 1880s, hamburger steaks were available at restaurants across the country. Often these steaks were served in locations that also served bread and sandwiches.

Given the frequent proximity of hamburger steak and bread — buns came later — combining these foods doesn’t seem like the work of a culinary genius. Instead, it appears to be a natural evolution.

By the late 1880s, hamburger steaks were popular across the United States. In 1887 a New York lodging house advertised “a bowl of coffee, hamburger steak and bread” for 10 cents. A few years later, in 1891, the Boston Globe carried an ad for a butcher shop selling a cookbook with a recipe for “hamburger on toast.”

A blurb in the July 25, 1893 edition of the Reno Gazette-Journal in Reno, Nev., announced that Tom Fraker had taken over the lunch counter at a local saloon, noting “Tom prides himself on his ability to make hamburger sandwiches.”

The following month, an ad boasted Fraker’s “celebrated Hamburger steak sandwiches are always on hand to replenish an empty stomach and fortify even Satan himself.”

Such a sinful association was not uncommon during the early burger history. Sold primarily at saloons and all-night lunch carts that catered to factory shift workers, the dish, at least in the imagination of polite society, seemed to have “something of the night” about it.

“‘They love darkness whose deeds are evil,’ is probably as good a reason as any why Hamburg steaks are cooked and eaten on the streets at night,” begins an 1894 San Francisco Chronicle account of street carts selling hamburger sandwiches. “A popular demand for this luxury at 2 o'clock in the morning has added a strong flavor of onion to that delicious combination of odors which surprises and delights the stranger who visits the business portion of this city between twilight and dawn.”

As I dug deeper into the burger’s history, I found that historian Andrew F. Smith had discussed some of these burger references from the 1890s in his 2008 book, “ Hamburger: A Global History .” Even so, regional burger-origin stories, or what Smith calls “hamburger fakelore,” continue to be taken as gospel in parts of the United States.

Folklorist Lucy Long says factually shaky tales of historic food “firsts” extend beyond the burger. “It’s very, very common for these origin stories to be claimed,” adds Long, the founder and director of the Center for Food and Culture .

Having the “first” of any food helps draw customers, Long explains. But they are also fueled by how that food ties in with our sense of place and identity.

“History is always a selection of what happened in the past along with an interpretation,” Long says. “People hear something, it makes sense to them, they like the image that it presents, so they start presenting it as history.”

Pieragostini, whose tip helped lead me down the burger rabbit hole, understands this pride. He used to have a local access TV show called “Connecticut Stories'' and has defended Connecticut “firsts.” Pieragostini’s great uncle patented the stoves used at Louis’ Lunch, and Pieragostini was a longtime defender of that burger origin story.

But when Pieragostini unearthed an 1894 ad for “hamburger steak sandwiches'' at a Texas saloon, he reached out to me to help set the record straight. “I was a little shocked,” he says, “but not disappointed, because you’ve got to find the truth.”

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A History of the Burger: From Ancient Rome to the Drive-Thru

2,000 years of fast food history from The World is Your Burger, a book celebrating the American icon.

Hannah Walhout is a senior editor at Travel + Leisure, where she oversees the magazine's Discoveries section and edits print essays and features with a focus on food and drink.

There's no denying that the hamburger occupies a unique place in the American mind. What other food conjures so many themes, stands for so many global forces as this iconic sandwich ? Convenience, mass production, globalization, capitalism, American exceptionalism — not to mention meat (lots of juicy, perfectly grilled meat ).

The World Is Your Burger: A Cultural History , a book by David Michaels out from Phaidon, conducts a deep dive into the development of the burger both as a food and as an idea. Michaels — a hospitality industry alum and owner of Bite Me Burger in Sydney — collects recipes, vintage photos, and chef dispatches in his beautifully designed tome. One of our favorite sections is his meticulously researched burger timeline, which traces its journey from a ground meat product to an international idol.

1st Century AD: Rome

Isicia Omentata

• The first stirrings of what came to resemble a hamburger, this ground- (minced-) meat dish contained pine nuts, pepper, and flavorings of wine and garum.

13th Century AD: The Steppes

Steak Tartare

• The Mongols were fierce horsemen who conquered most of Eurasia with thick slabs of beef tucked under their saddles, eaten after being tenderized by a day's riding.

1747: London

"Hamburg" Sausage

• Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery is published, describing this smoked sausage of ground (minced) beef, suet, pepper, cloves, nutmeg, garlic, vinegar, salt, red wine, and rum, to be served on toast.

1802: Oxford

The Oxford English Dictionary

• The English language's foremost lexicon describes Hamburg steak as "a hard slab of salted, minced [ground] beef, often slightly smoked, mixed with onions and breadcrumbs."

1845: Virginia

The Meat Grinder

• G. A. Coffman created and patented his Machine for Cutting Sausage-Meat, which featured rotating blades under a spiral feeder, akin to modern meat grinders (mincers).

1885: Erie County Fair, New York

The Menches Brothers

• There are dubious and conflicting claims that at this fair in New York State the brothers ran out of pork sausages and so put beef into a sandwich, thereby creating a burger.

1885: Seymour Fair, Wisconsin

Charlie Nagreen

• Nagreen, affectionately known as "Hamburger Charlie," apparently squashed a beef meatball between slices of bread so his customers could walk around eating — a concoction he claimed was the first hamburger.

1891: Bowden, Oklahoma

Oscar Weber Wilby

• The first documented appearance of flame-grilled beef patties in a sourdough bun, created by Bilby and his wife Fanny to celebrate the Fourth of July.

1900: New Haven, Connecticut

Louis Lassen

• The United States Library of Congress credits Lassen with creating the first hamburger, but doubt remains, as his beef patty was served between two slices of toast rather than the bun that the true burger demands.

1904: St. Louis World's Fair, Missouri

Fletcher Davis

• Davis claimed to have been serving beef in sandwiches since the 1880s and to have sold out of his "hamburgers" at this world-famous exhibition.

1906: Chicago, Illinois

• Upton Sinclair's novel about the meat-packing industry led many Americans to distrust the quality of ground (minced) beef, even though that was not Sinclair's aim at all.

1916: Wichita, Kansas

Walter Anderson

• Anderson, one of the two geniuses behind White Castle, originally started trading from a food cart, serving burgers with specifically created buns and using his own handmade spatula.

1921: Wichita, Kansas

White Castle

• Cook Walter Anderson and entrepreneur Billy Ingram opened their first restaurant and changed the course of hamburger history, with innovations in design, cooking, and serving.

1925: Pasadena, California

The Cheese Hamburger

• Lionel Sternberger, running his father's diner, The Rite Spot, claimed to be the first man to put cheese over a patty in a bun, which he called a Cheese Hamburger.

Fleischer Studios, 1931

• The New York-based animation house created the famous hamburger-eating comic character J. Wellington Wimpy for the Popeye series; the restaurant was later named after him.

Louisville, Kentucky, 1934

"A New Tang"

• That was how Kaelin's Restaurant described the taste when they melted cheese over patties, which they claimed to be the first proper cheeseburger.

1935: Denver, Colorado

Cheeseburger™?

• Louis Ballast submitted a trademark for "The Cheeseburger" for his now defunct Humpty Dumpty Drive-In, though historians query whether he received it.

1937: Glendale, California

The Big Boy

• Bob Wian founded Bob's Pantry in 1936 and within a year had gone for broke, slicing a bun into three and using two patties to create the first double-decker burger.

1948: San Bernardino, California

McDonald's

• Though the McDonald brothers had run a barbecue shack since 1940, in 1948 they switched to hamburgers and started what became the largest fast-food chain in the world.

1954: Miami, Florida

Burger King

• David Edgerton and James McLamore purchased the floundering Insta-Burger King and renamed it, creating the biggest challenger to the McDonald's fast-food crown.

1954: London

Wimpy's

• J. Lyons and Co. bought franchise rights to run Wimpy burger bars in England and opened their first as a concession in a Lyons Corner House restaurant on Coventry Street in Central London.

1955: Des Plaines, Illinois

• Ray Kroc, erstwhile milkshake-machine salesman, joined the McDonald brothers before eventually buying them out and transforming the brand into a global phenomenon.

1967: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Big Mac

• Though it wasn't introduced nationwide until a year later, 1967 saw the invention by Jim Delligatti of what has become one of McDonald's signature items, the Big Mac.

1969: Columbus, Ohio

Wendy's

• For a long time the third-biggest hamburger retailer in the world, Wendy's was a later starter when created by former Kentucky Fried Chicken head chef Dave Thomas.

Reprinted with permission from The World is Your Burger: A Cultural History by David Michaels, $39.95 at phaidon.com

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Hamburger Paragraph Template for Essay Writing

3-minute read

• 3rd November 2023

It almost sounds like something you might see on a menu at a fast-food restaurant, but a “hamburger paragraph” is a method of essay writing often taught in schools to help students structure their paragraphs effectively. Just as a burger consists of various layers that come together to create a satisfying whole, an essay is built up of paragraphs that follow a specific structure.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the concept of a hamburger paragraph and how it can serve as a handy template for essay writing.

Hamburger Paragraph Template

The template below lists the “ingredients” of a hamburger paragraph:

Top Bun (Topic Sentence):

Introduce the main idea of the paragraph .

Filling (Supporting Detail #1):

Introduce your first supporting detail or example that backs up your main idea.

Filling (Supporting Detail #2):

Introduce your second supporting detail or example.

Filling (Supporting Detail #3):

Introduce your third supporting detail or example. Note: Depending on the depth required, you may have more or fewer supporting details.

Bottom Bun (Concluding Sentence):

Wrap up the paragraph by restating or summarizing the main idea – or transition to the next paragraph . Ensure that every main point or idea presented in the paragraph is well-supported and rounded off with a conclusion or transition.

Example of a Hamburger Paragraph Using the Template

Here’s a paragraph about dogs written following the hamburger paragraph method:

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Dogs have a reputation for being loyal companions.

Filling #1:

Historically, dogs have been known to travel vast distances to reunite with their owners.

Filling #2:

Many breeds have been specifically bred for their loyalty traits, such as Golden Retrievers and German Shepherds.

Filling #3:

Pet owners’ personal experiences further support the claim, with countless stories of dogs displaying unwavering loyalty in various situations.

Bottom Bun:

With their history, breeding, and the personal anecdotes of many, it’s clear why dogs are cherished for their loyalty.

The  hamburger template assists writers, especially those new to essay writing, in assembling a well-structured essay, helping them organize their thoughts and research into a logical format that readers can easily follow. Students can use this structure to ensure they’re fleshing out their ideas adequately and maintaining a logical flow throughout their essays.

So next time you’re writing an essay, think of your paragraphs as a delicious stack of hamburger paragraphs, with each one adding a unique flavor to your overall composition. If you’d like a professional proofreader to review your essay and its structure once you’ve completed your first draft, we’d be happy to help. Check out our essay proofreading services , or try us out by submitting a free sample !

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Home / Essay Samples / Food / Hamburger / The History of Hamburger: the Taste of American Society

The History of Hamburger: the Taste of American Society

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Explore our collection of excellent history paper examples about various topics. Download the pdf examples for free and read to get inspiration for your own essay.

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How to Use History Essay Examples

History essay examples are a valuable tool for students looking for inspiration and guidance on how to approach their own essays. 

By analyzing successful essays, you can learn effective writing techniques that can be expected in a high-quality history essay. 

Here are some tips that will help you take full advantage of the samples above.

Tips for Effectively Using History Essay Examples

• Analyze the Structure:

Pay close attention to how the essay is organized, including the introduction, body paragraphs, and conclusion. Look for how the author transitions between paragraphs and the use of evidence to support their argument.

• Study the Thesis Statement:

The thesis statement is the backbone of any successful history essay. Analyze how the author crafted their thesis statement, and consider how you can apply this to your own writing.

• Take Note of the Evidence: 

Effective history essays rely on using strong evidence to support their arguments. Take note of the sources and types of evidence used in the essay. Consider how you can apply similar evidence to support your own arguments.

• Pay Attention to the Formatting and Other Academic Formalities:

The sample essays also demonstrate how you can incorporate academic formalities and standards while keeping the essay engaging. See how these essays fulfill academic standards and try to follow them in your own writing.

• Practice Writing:

While analyzing history essay examples can be helpful, it is important to also practice writing your own essays. Use the examples as inspiration, but try to craft your own unique approach to your topic. 

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Writing the Essay - Hamburger Style

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The Burger Metaphor to avoid bad paragraphs

Salads are good. They have their place, but right now, we are making a sandwich, and we need buns to hold it all together.              

Composing a paragraph is like building a hamburger. First, we need the buns to hold the sandwich together.  Without the bread to hold everything in, it's just not a sandwich. It's a salad.  

Notice the buns are similar. They are both made of bread; they both have similar jobs. But they are distinct as well. For example, the bottom bun (the 

conclusion) is flat and allows the burger to sit nicely on the plate and become part of the whole meal (the entire essay). 

The heart and soul of a history essay is the factual information. One cannot do historical analysis without historical facts to analyze. Similarly, the heart and soul of our burger is the meat. 

The factual information is the heart and soul of a paragraph. One of the biggest problems that students tend to have when they begin to write historical essays is that

 they do not have factual information that they can analyze. Therefore, if they do try to make a burger, they end up with a lot of bread and hardly any meat. 

Often, students will turn in a grandiose topic sentence and a likewise complex conclusion

with a small sliver of bacon in between. Usually, students have read or heard a thesis and are simply repeating this idea without the ability to defend it. Good historical writing is original. The idea  being defended in the paragraph comes from the student's  own ability to develop an opinion based on their own historical analysis, which, in turn, requires historical knowledge. 

No amount of fancy misdirection, big words, vague ideas, or wordy and unclear sentences, can make up for the fact that the sandwich doesn't have much substance.  

Occasionally, history teachers requiring students to learn names, dates, or places will hear the criticism,

"memorization is the lowest form of learning."

What the critics fail to recognize is that in  Bloom's Taxonomy, while  "memorization" or "remembering"

is lowest on the list, and one should certainly strive to go beyond mere memorization, it is also the base of the pyramid. One cannot move toward analysis and the creation of original work without first remembering the factual information. 

An essay containing paragraphs that contain  only  factual information, is pretty dry, boring, and is little more than a bulleted list. 

While a hamburger patty between two buns meets the technical definition of a 

hamburger, it is really missing something.

The toppings that one places on the burger really make the hamburger one's own creation. 

While the buns hold the sandwich together, the toppings that

one places on the burger really make the hamburger one's own creation. The historical analysis of factual information is what makes the historical writing one's own. The dry, seemingly isolated

meat and bun are connected together through the historical analysis. These toppings give the burger a unique flavor. 

As one practices and becomes more and more capable, one is able to recognize more nuanced ways to explore and articulate historical arguments. Unfortunately, we all want to be the gourmet chef without putting in the work needed. 

We tend to see some spices on the shelf and don't really understand if they really go together or not. As one becomes stronger at historical analysis and draws from more factual information, one can begin to start adding a pinch of salt and pepper, or other spices that help create great flavor. Using big words, or writing in such a convoluted way in order to "sound smart"does not have the desired effect. When one says something like "..and the periphery of that thing called the empire outspread to include more territorial holdings..." rather than simply saying "...the empire expanded..." one does not sound smart, one sounds like someone  trying to sound smart. 

We may not be gourmet chefs but we can all begin to create our own unique hamburgers. 

We may not all be historians, but we can all create our own unique historical essays. 

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A Jaw-Dropping Question is Answered a Decade Later

Nora O’Neill and Gabriel Grand began dating in 2014. Ms. O’Neill’s twin had an inkling then that the relationship was going to get serious.

By Rosalie R. Radomsky

Nora Patrice O’Neill and Gabriel Grand had only been dating a couple of months when her twin brother, Patrick, posed a jaw-dropping question.

“Gabe, when are you going to marry my sister?” he asked over dinner with Ms. O’Neill’s parents in November 2014 at a now-closed French restaurant during Harvard’s freshman family weekend.

After a very awkward moment, everyone laughed.

Mr. Grand and Ms. O’Neill, now 28, first met in a dining hall soon after arriving on the campus as freshmen at Harvard that September. A week later, he sat next to her in their history of neuroscience seminar.

“I’m interested in brains and cognition and she in the history of science,” he said.

Mr. Grand, who grew up in Pelham, N.Y., graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard. He is now pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science focusing on language and cognition at the computer science and A.I. lab at M.I.T.

“We kept running into each other, and after the fourth time, we exchanged numbers,” Ms. O’Neill said. They both lived in Wigglesworth Hall, which has separate entryways but is connected by a basement and a laundry room.

Ms. O’Neill, who is from Washington, D.C., graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in history and science. She is now pursuing a medical degree and doctorate at Yale in the history of science and medicine.

“I definitely had a crush on her,” Mr. Grand said. “I was trying to play things a little cool.”

One Friday, after they ended up at the same party, they headed to the Tasty Burger in Harvard Square after midnight where they shared fries, and a first kiss. “It was very unofficially our first date,” he said.

The next morning he asked her on a real one. They dined at the now-closed Boathouse in Cambridge that evening, where they drew pictures illustrating their lives with crayons on a paper tablecloth, including characters they loved from “SpongeBob SquarePants.”

“I started to fall in love with her,” Mr. Grand said.

As family weekend rolled around in November, Ms. O’Neill was eager for him to meet her twin brother, Patrick, who has intellectual disabilities and “means the world to me,” she said.

“He is somebody so full of joy,” Mr. Grand said.

The couple continued to get serious after the family dinner in November, and mostly hung out studying together, unwinding with “Game of Thrones.”

[Click here to binge read this week’s featured couples.]

That summer, after his cognitive neuroscience program ended in Trento, Italy, they met in Florence, where he led her on a scavenger hunt of local sites with clues he handed her on postcards.

Over dinner at a trattoria, he gave her gold earrings etched with a fleur-de-lis that he had bought a month earlier along the Ponte Vecchio. (She wore them at their wedding).

In April 2017, the spring semester of junior year, they broke up. “We realized our relationship had become serious,” he said. “We were both doing some soul-searching.”

After nine months apart, however, they realized they wanted to be together, and began quietly dating again.

In 2019, while they were both working, they moved into a four-bedroom apartment in Cambridge with three other classmates.

Once Covid hit, they moved out and worked remotely from his parents’ house on Shelter Island, N.Y., and usually had lunch with his paternal grandmother across the road. Ms. O’Neill made a cinnamon crumb coffee cake for her birthday. (His mother, Laurie Goodstein, is a deputy editor on the international desk at The New York Times.)

Over the last four years, during their New Haven-Boston relationship, they saw each other most weekends as they pursued their doctoral degrees. She plans to join him in Cambridge in August.

On Oct. 15, 2022, on an overlook along a secluded trail near Mount Holyoke, Mass., he got down on one knee on golden leaves carpeting the ground.

“Finally,” her twin brother said when he heard the news of their engagement.

On May 11, Molly and Dolly, two draft horses, stood in a field, as Rabbi Morris Barzilai, the groom’s bar mitzvah rabbi, officiated in an open-sided pavilion before 161 guests at Valley View Farm in Haydenville, Mass. (The night before, the couple and members of the wedding party, who stayed at the farm, watched the Aurora Borealis lights, monitored by a friend on the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD.)

At the ceremony, the couple stepped on a glass and recited the seven blessings based on Jewish tradition, then added an eighth blessing — an Irish one, “May the Road Rise to Meet You,” recorded by her 97-year-old maternal grandfather for the occasion.

During the cocktail hour, the groom played guitar and sang his favorite Spanish love ballad “Tuyo” by Rodrigo Amarante, and crooned Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”

Later, in the barn, the bride and her mother danced an Irish Swallowtail jig followed by a hora, both accompanied by a fiddler. The couple’s first dance was to “First Try” by Johnnyswim.

“We stuck together,” Ms. O’Neill said of the relationship. “And got it right on the first try.”

Weddings Trends and Ideas

Keeping Friendships Intact: The soon-to-be-married couple and their closest friends might experience stress and even tension leading up to their nuptials. Here’s how to avoid a friendship breakup .

‘Edible Haute Couture’: Bastien Blanc-Tailleur, a luxury cake designer based in Paris, creates opulent confections for high-profile clients , including European royalty and American socialites.

Reinventing a Mexican Tradition: Mariachi, a soundtrack for celebration in Mexico, offers a way for couples to honor their heritage  at their weddings.

Something Thrifted: Focused on recycled clothing , some brides are finding their wedding attire on vintage sites and at resale stores.

Brand Your Love Story: Some couples are going above and beyond to personalize their weddings, with bespoke party favors and custom experiences for guests .

Going to Great Lengths : Mega wedding cakes are momentous for reasons beyond their size — they are part of an emerging trend of extremely long cakes .