Mississippi Slugburger

In Corinth, Mississippi, fifteen miles south of the Tennessee state line, the burger at the counter of Borroum's Drug Store and Soda Fountain is half meat and half flour. A pre-mixed patty of ground beef cut with cornmeal or flour, pressed thin, dropped into a deep pot of hot shortening, and lifted out with a frizzled, lacy edge the size of a soup saucer. A plain white burger bun, a stripe of yellow mustard, four flat dill pickle chips, a slice of raw onion. No cheese in the original; no lettuce, no tomato. The patty sets the rule, and everything else is built around what a deep-fried, extended patty can carry.

The extender is the recipe. The first slugburgers ran around fifty percent beef and fifty percent something else, soybean meal in the Depression-era kitchens and flour or cornmeal at most counters today. The patty dilution is not the compromise the cook apologizes for. It is the defining move, the one that produces the lacy fried edge a denser pure-beef patty cannot. A starch-bound patty pressed thin and dropped in hot shortening behaves differently from a pure-meat patty pressed thin and dropped in hot shortening. The starch crisps into a lacy net while the meat inside stays soft. The whole reason the sandwich is built around shortening and a thin pressed patty is to set that lacy edge.

Every part is sized to the particular nature of a deep-fried extended patty. The bun is soft, faintly sweet, and unremarkable on purpose, sized to the patty so the bread-to-meat ratio reads honest; a brioche or a kaiser would fight the patty's plain quality and bury the lacy edge. The mustard is yellow, applied to the bun rather than the patty, for an acidic line that cuts the starch-and-fat. The pickle chips are flat and crisp, the raw onion is sliced thin enough to read as flavor rather than mass. The shortening is the structural choice that matters most: the deep fry sets the starch in the patty into a rigid lacy crust on every side, which is what lets a thin extended patty hold together from fryer to hand without collapsing.

At the counter at Borroum's the smell comes off the fryer first, hot beef fat and toasted flour, with the soft yeasty warmth of the bun a beat behind. The patty arrives with the lacy edge still crackling, the bun yielding immediately under the thumb. Bite and the fried rim shatters with an audible snap, then the soft inside of the patty gives way, the mustard hits sharp and acidic, the pickle chips snap and pulse vinegar, the raw onion lands clean. The shortening shows up in the back of the second bite as a faint nutty richness the cornmeal carries with it. The lacy edge keeps its snap for about three minutes; after that the patty softens uniformly and the sandwich is a different food.

The order at Borroum's in Corinth and at the half-dozen slugburger shops along the Tennessee-Mississippi state line is short. A slugburger gets the standard, with mustard pickle onion the default and no cheese unless asked. A double stacks two thin patties for more lacy edge without more bun, and a chili dog stacks the same patty under a beanless brown sauce in a Coney style. The Slugburger Festival, held in downtown Corinth on the second weekend in July since 1988, sells five thousand burgers across two days and crowns a slugburger-eating champion. The town shut down two blocks of Fillmore Street for the festival the year it began and has done so every July since.

The variations stay inside the extended-fried-patty frame. A double for more crust, a cheese version with American melted in the last seconds of the fry, a chili-topped Coney-style build. The extender varies by shop: cornmeal at Borroum's, flour at Weeks's in Booneville, soybean meal in the older Depression-era recipe. The slugburger sits in the broader Depression-era extender-burger tradition that includes the loose-meat sandwich and the maid-rite of Iowa, but those keep their meat loose and unfried while the slugburger presses and deep-fries. The Onion Burger of Oklahoma griddles a thin patty with onion pressed into it and is sometimes named in the same breath, but it is a different cooking method on a different problem, not a slugburger variant. A pure-beef burger does not get the name.

Origin and history

The slugburger is a documented Depression-era sandwich from the cotton-economy towns of northeast Mississippi and western Tennessee. Borroum's Drug Store and Soda Fountain opened in Corinth in 1865, three years after the Battle of Corinth and a decade before the town was reincorporated, and is the oldest continuously operating soda fountain in Mississippi by the Mississippi Historical Society's count. The slugburger appeared on Borroum's counter and at other Corinth lunch counters during the 1920s and 1930s, when sharecropper families and tenant farmers in the Tennessee Valley needed a hot lunch sandwich a counter could sell for five cents and a customer could afford to buy.

The name itself is a Depression-era coinage from the slang for a nickel: a slug, in railroad and machine-shop usage, was a counterfeit coin or a token, and by extension a five-cent piece, and a slugburger was the burger you could buy for a slug. Other names in the same period and region include the dough burger and the doughburger, both descriptive of the flour-and-meal extender. Soybean meal as the extender, attested in Mississippi Agricultural Experiment Station bulletins from the 1930s, was the original; cornmeal and wheat flour came in as substitutes through the 1940s and 1950s and are the default at most counters today. The patty stayed deep-fried in shortening or lard, never griddled, across every variation.

The first Slugburger Festival ran on July 9 and 10, 1988, and was organized by the Corinth Area Chamber of Commerce to mark the burger's place in the town's economy after the slugburger had been on local menus for sixty years. Borroum's Drug Store still operates in its original 1865 building on Waldron Street in Corinth, two doors down from the Crossroads Museum, and still serves the same slugburger off the same fryer to the same counter on Saturday mornings.