Back in July, we dealt with the multiple claimants to the title "inventor of the hamburger." At the time, we asked you not to get us started on
who invented the hot dog, but what with the passing of the summer grilling season and the rolling-around of Hot Dog Day;
well, we’ve decided to take on the topic.
The sausage itself goes back thousands of years. There are descriptions from China
as far back as 589 BCE, and even a lost Greek comedy
from around 500 BCE called The Sausage.
The "hot dog" variation, though, is of
comparatively recent vintage. As with the hamburger, the food is of German or
Austrian origin. The "frankfurter sandwich" clearly owes its name to the city of Frankfurt, and the "wiener"
to Vienna (or "Wien," as the locals know it). And while
those creations date back to around 1500 AD, the hot dog we know and love
today didn't emigrate to the United States until around 1867, when German
immigrant Charles Feltman began selling sausages in rolls to hungry visitors at Coney Island.
Feltman served 3,684 hot dogs during his first year in business, a mere
fraction of the number consumed today.
Feltman would seem to hold the crown as inventor of the hot dog, but Antonoine Feuchtwanger of St. Louis also has his supporters. Feuchtwanger, in a tale that
sounds apocryphal, sold sausages on the streets and gave his customers white gloves to protect their hands from the hot food. After too many
customers walked off with the gloves, Feuchtwanger asked his baker
brother-in-law to devise a bun to put the sausages in. What makes this story sound fishy
to us is another story involving one Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger, who served sausages in rolls at either the 1893 World's Columbian
Exposition in Chicago or the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, again substituting bread rolls for gloves.
Even the story of how the name "hot dog" was coined is murky.
Supposedly, around 1900, cartoonist Tad Dorgan
heard a vendor at New York's Polo Grounds
selling "red hot dachshund
sandwiches," and, not knowing how to
spell "dachshund," Dorgan drew a cartoon featuring a "hot dog" instead. (This story loses credibility when one
realizes that Dorgan didn't move to New York until 1903, the cartoon in
question has never turned up, and the term "hot dog" was already in
use by 1893.)
Regardless of where the hot dog came from or how it got its name, Americans
love them, and eat some 20 billion every year (that's 70 per person), with 155 million of
those consumed on the Fourth of July alone.
While pretty much everyone seems to eat hot dogs, everyone also has their own
particular way of enjoying them. My own favorite is a Dodger Dog with ketchup, mustard, and relish. You can also get them
deep-fried ("rippers"),
with bacon and guacamole, with chili and slaw, on a stick, made from antelope, elk, buffalo, reindeer, or salmon, done up like a pizza,
from the place where the pros go,
or you can try the inexplicably popular Chicago style, which
buries the poor dog under a mountain of mustard, pickle spears, tomatoes, peppers, celery
salt, and neon-green relish.
Now, if you'll excuse me, the "recession special" at Gray's Papaya (two dogs and a drink for less
than five bucks) is sounding mighty good right about now.
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