I bought an Arabic language cookbook recently, and have started to read over it as a way of getting in some light practice. "The Complete Cooking Guide for the Modern Woman, More Than 560 Arabic and international recipes." There are some weird things in there... like this.
Ingredients:
1/2 kilo of ground meat
1 cup of dried "Afgani" bread crumbs
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup tomato juice
1 well-beaten egg
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
Method:
Mix all ingredients well and shape into 2-cm thick patties, placing them under the broiler in the oven at a distance of about 8 cm. Broil the patties for 10 minutes then turn them over to brown the other side, then serve warm with "bread especially for hamburgers" (hamburger buns).
I love some of the Arabic used ("bread especially for hamburgers," teaspoon = "small spoon," and "brown the patties" = "redden the disks"). Still, these sound a bit like meatloaf sandwiches, rather than hamburgers.
There is a completely separate recipe directly below this one for "Hamburger with Cheese." It reads:
Do the same thing but when you brown the other side of the patties, place a thin slice of yellow cheese on top of each patty and place in the oven until the cheese slice melts a little and then serve.
(Arabs are the kings of run-on sentences.) It had never occurred to me before that cheeseburgers might be considered different enough from hamburgers to have their own entry.