This is Memorial Day Weekend, when we honor those who sacrificed their lives for our country. Visiting a military cemetery and placing flowers on a grave is the traditional and most meaningful way to celebrate our fallen heroes and heroines.
There are many ways to celebrate. One of the most popular is getting together with family and friends for a barbecue. And a favorite item on the menu is the HOT DOG.
What is the origin of the hot dog?
The humble hot dog, a centerpiece of Americana, evokes fond images of ballparks, cookouts, and condiment-covered bliss. But how did the hot dog come to be? Where did the hot dog get its name? And why can’t we ever eat enough of them?
It turns out, the history of the hot dog is as much the mystery of the hot dog as its origins are shrouded in controversy and competing claims. Let’s start at the beginning… way back in the beginning.
Hot dogs in the ancient world
Hot dogs are a kind of sausage, which may date back to the 7th century BCE, when Homer mentioned a sausage in his epic poem The Odyssey.
Centuries later, around 64 CE, Emperor Nero’s cook Gaius starred in a sausage legend of his own, when it is said that he “discovered” them.
At the time, pigs were customarily starved the week before they were to be cooked and served. According to the popular telling, one pig was roasted but had not been properly cleaned. Gaius ran a knife into the pig’s belly to see if it was fit to eat. To his great surprise, the pig’s puffed-up intestines popped out of the roast. Gaius supposedly said, “I have discovered something of great importance,” and proceeded to stuff the intestines with ground venison, ground beef, cooked ground wheat, and spices, tying them into sections as he went.
Hot dogs in Europe
As time rolled on, Europeans embraced sausages in their cuisine, particularly across Germany. The Germans created hundreds of versions of sausages to pair with kraut and beer.
Two different European towns now claim to be the birthplace of the hot dog: Frankfurt, Germany, and Vienna, Austria.
Frankfurt (officially Frankfurt am Main) claims that the hot dog was invented there in 1487, pointing to the word frankfurter as proof of the hot dog’s roots in the city. In fact, in 1987, Frankfurt threw a huge celebration honoring the 500th anniversary of the hot dog.
Rather than dating the hot dog to five years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, however, the city of Vienna claims that the hot dog began there in the late 19th century. According to Vienna (Wien in German, hence the name wiener or wienerwurst), Austro-Hungarian Emil Reichel and Sam Ladany lived there when they invented the hot dog. The pair then went on to sell their creation at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago.
Even if Reichel and Ladany were not the first to invent the hot dog, they probably were the first to invent the Chicago-style hot dog, with its signature toppings of bright green relish, dill pickle spear, tomato slices, pickled peppers, and celery salt. Reichel and Ladany are the cofounders of Vienna Beef, the Chicago-based hot dog manufacturer that remains at the heart of the city’s cuisine even today, over a century since it began.
To complicate matters even further, Johann Georghehner is another name sometimes credited with inventing the hot dog. Georghehner was a butcher who lived in Coburg, Germany in the late 1600s, more than 100 years after the 1487 date touted by the city of Frankfurt. According to these reports, Georghehner traveled to Frankfurt to promote his new food, and that’s when the hot dog was born.
Confused yet? Well, just wait. There’s more confusion to add to the picture.
Hot dogs in America
As Europeans came to the United States throughout the late 19th century, sausage vending became a relatively inexpensive startup business for upwardly mobile immigrants.
Sausage carts were a fixture of urban life.
Street peddlers provided much of the everyday food the less affluent public consumed at the turn of the century. Their wares were not only convenient and inexpensive, but they may also have been a wise choice. In 1906, the same year that Upton Sinclair published his novel The Jungle to expose the harsh conditions of the meat-packing industry, a study by a health commission in New York City concluded that street food was actually fresher than the food sold in fixed-location restaurants. Hawkers, after all, got their food straight from the wholesale markets and had no means to store it overnight.
What is the difference between sausages and hot dogs?
Sausage is a broad term that can describe any ground meat encased with herbs and spices. Casings may be either natural or synthetic. Hot dogs are a type of sausage.
The meat in a hot dog is more finely ground than the meat in a sausage, giving the hot dog a smoother texture. The spice mix in a hot dog is generally milder than in a sausage.
But the sausage didn’t really become a hot dog until it was paired with its signature bun. So, who should we credit for that innovation?
Who introduced the hot dog bun? Where the hot dog bun may have been born: Coney Island
Around 1867, Charles Feltman opened what may have been the first hot dog cart on Coney Island. Originally from Hannover, Germany, Feltman owned a pie-wagon that delivered freshly baked pies to Coney Island inns and saloons. Customers hoped the baker would add hot sandwiches to his offerings, but the wagon was too small to accommodate the variety of ingredients. Perhaps, Feltman thought, something simple like a sausage on a roll could serve as a hot lunch option.
Feltman consulted with the wheelwright who had built the original pie-wagon. The wheelwright added a tin-lined chest to keep the rolls fresh and rigged a small charcoal stove inside to boil sausages. According to great-grandson Charles Robert Feltman, Feltman’s bakery sold 3,684 pork sausages on a bun in its first year.
Feltman went on to build something of an empire on the Coney Island boardwalk, consisting of a hotel, beer gardens, restaurants, rides, and even a ballroom. He claimed an all-time record of serving 100,000 people and 40,000 hot dogs in a single day.
But Feltman’s contribution to hot dog history is at least partly romanticized. According to historian Bruce Kraig, author of Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America, there is no good evidence of Feltman’s sausage cart. And as a fine-dining restaurateur, Feltman deplored the small booths and food stands that had multiplied near his seaside businesses. So who’s to say?
Who introduced the hot dog bun? The most likely answer
Another Coney Island baker likely played a central role in inventing the hot dog bun. Ignatz Frischman arrived in New York from Austria before 1850. According to his 1904 New York Times obituary, Frischman “observed that the crowds [at Coney Island]… displayed a fondness for frankfurter sandwiches. In those days, the frankfurter was served to the hungry pleasure seekers between two slices of bread. It occurred to Mr. Frishman that it would be more delectable tucked in the depths of a Vienna roll of special size.”
The pioneering baker “sold to the frankfurter men in small quantities for a while, and at a small profit, until they became the only means by which the frankfurter could be sold,” wrote the Iola Daily Record. The Brooklyn Daily Times said, “When Frischman opened his modest little bakery and started the manufacture of a certain oblong roll that the frankfurter men needed in their business, ‘Coney’ sprang into the limelight… Visitors to Coney Island did not feel as though they had ‘done’ the resort thoroughly without devouring a hot ‘frankfurter and.’
What’s more, that same skeptical historian Bruce Kraig conceded, “I don’t see why the Frischman story can’t be true. His creation was emulated by many afterward.” Well, hot diggity dog! That’s about as straight an answer as you’ll find on this topic.
Unfortunately, this leads us to a murkier question…
How did the hot dog get its name?
It turns out, the term hot dog grew out of crude jokes and college humor.
Few people want to know “how the sausage gets made.” Feared ingredients such as dogs, rats, cats, and even humans have been rumored to be in cased meats since at least the Middle Ages. Therefore, said Cohen, “the term was based on a popular 19th-century belief that dog meat could turn up in sausages, and this belief had a basis in fact.” If this seems far-fetched, meat-packers at the time also added sawdust, formaldehyde, and other fillers to sausages. To make things worse, cities had little, if any, organized garbage disposal or clean water delivery.
In this milieu, pushcarts would congregate near college dorms where they became known as “dog wagons,” a name deriding the questionable origin of the meat.
Many university humor magazines, such as those from Harvard, Princeton, and Cornell, demonstrate that the term hot dog was well-known by 1900. In fact, the October 5, 1895 edition of the Yale Record includes a poem about “The Kennel Club,” a dog wagon that had opened a year before. This facetiousness, along with the association with German dachshunds, linked sausages to dogs ever since.
Even earlier instances of the term hot dog may be found in print, including one from December 1892 in Paterson, New Jersey’s Daily Press. Newspapers played a central role in popularizing neologisms and slang of the time, as wire services enabled small-town readers to follow what was happening in big cities and immigrant communities. Idioms such as “for crying out loud,” “to see red,” and “makin’ whoopee” joined “hot dog” and “weenie roasts” among the era’s contributions.
Though the danger of canine meat in hot dogs no longer exists, the jokes, questions, and innuendos persist even today. But so does our collective love and cultural devotion to the humble hot dog, which never seems to fade from popular culture. The hot dog is, as a widespread joke from the 1930s goes, the noblest kind of dog: for it does not bite the hand that feeds it; it feeds the hand that bites it.
New variations keep developing, but you don’t have to dress up a hot dog with a lot of fancy trappings to like it. The plainest hot dog is still a cured meat spiced with pepper, garlic, coriander, cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg, paprika, and allspice. The meat is usually beef or pork, trimmed from larger cuts like roasts, chops, and tenderloins. You can also find hot dog varieties made of chicken or turkey. And though you may have heard urban legends about how hot dogs are made of a bunch of leftover parts, meat science expert Dr. Janeal Yancey explains that hot dogs are made of “the same stuff that you make into ground beef or ground pork. The trimmings used to make hot dogs are pieces of meat that don’t make good steaks and roasts because they aren’t a certain tenderness, size, shape, or weight.”
It’s not surprising, then, that in 2019, Americans spent $2.3 billion on hot dogs. Hot dogs are especially popular in the summer months, enjoyed at a ballpark or Fourth of July cookout. The average American eats 70 hot dogs per year.
Falling behind your average? Then get yourself a hot dog, and enjoy it however you like: with squirts of ketchup or mounds of onions, on a pretzel bun or straight out of the package, with the spiciest mustard or the gooiest cheese. The hot dog is a glorious tradition that stretches back centuries and continues every time you bite into one.
CREDIT: TheHotDog.org
Hot Dog FAQs:
Who invented the hot dog?
It’s hard to say definitively who invented the hot dog, but credit has gone to Emil Reichel and Sam Ladany (the co-founders of Vienna Beef) and Johann Georghehner, a German butcher. No one is entirely sure
Why are they called franks or wieners?
Hot dogs are called franks, short for frankfurters, because they may have begun in Frankfurt, Germany. Hot dogs are called wieners because they may have begun in Vienna, Austria, which is wien in German.
When was the hot dog invented?
Sausages date all the way back to ancient times, but the hot dog is first found mentioned in print in the late 1800s.
Where was the hot dog invented?
There is no definitive answer, but Frankfurt, Germany and Vienna, Austria both take credit for the invention of the hot dog.
How did the hot dog got it’s name?
There are several myths about how the hot dog got its name, but the most likely origin is 19th-century college humor, when students would make crude jokes about the questionable origin of the meat in hot dogs.
Why is it called a hot dog?
There are several myths about how the hot dog got its name, but the most likely origin is 19th-century college humor, when students would make crude jokes about the questionable origin of the meat in hot dogs.
Why are hot dogs red?
Hot dogs are red because sodium nitrite is added to cure the meat, add flavor, and prevent the growth of bacteria. Sodium nitrite is also added to bacon, cold cuts, and Spam.
CREDIT: TheHotDog.org
What a fun article! So interesting--especially on this big 'hot dog' eating holiday. Thanks for posting.