HOT DOG

Edible

Series Editor: Andrew F. Smith

EDIBLE is a revolutionary new series of books dedicated to food and drink that explores the rich history of cuisine. Each book reveals the global history and culture of one type of food or beverage.

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Pancake Ken Albala

Spices Fred Czarra

Pizza Carol Helstosky

Pie Janet Clarkson

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Bread William Rubel

Ice Cream Laura Weiss

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Lobster Elisabeth Townsend

Caviar Nichola Fletcher

Milk Hannah Velten

Dates Nawal Nasrallah

Pasta Kantha Shelke

Cheese Andrew Dalby

Soup Janet Clarkson

Chocolate Sarah Moss

Tea Helen Saberi

Cocktails Joseph M. Carlin

Tomato Deborah A. Duchon

Coffee Jonathan Morris

Vodka Patricia Herlihy

Curry Colleen Taylor Sen

Whiskey Kevin R. Rosar

Fish and Chips Panikos Panayi

Wine Marc Millon

Hot Dog

A Global History

Bruce Kraig

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

33 Great Sutton Street

London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2009

Copyright © Bruce Kraig 2009

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,

mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior

permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Kraig, Bruce

Hot dog : a global history. – (Edible)

1. Frankfurters – History 2. Sausages – History

3. Food habits – United States – History

4. Convenience foods – United States – History

I. Title

641.3´6´09

eISBN: 9781861896841

Contents

Preface

Introduction: What is a Hot Dog?

1 Hot Dog History

2 How Hot Dogs are Made

3 How Hot Dogs are Sold

4 Hot Dog Culture

5 Hot Dogs Around the World

The Hot Dog Factory

Recipes

References

Select Bibliography

Websites and Associations

Acknowledgements

Photo Acknowledgements

Index

Preface

I was once walking along West 42nd Street, near the New York Public Library, when I passed a pair of voluminous people, a man and a woman, standing in front of a small fast-food emporium. Both were holding hot dogs in their hands – all four of them. I heard one of them say, in a heartfelt voice, ‘I love hot dogs!’ Turning, I saw this happy pair had what can only be described as beatific looks in their eyes and rapturous smiles on their mustard-smeared lips. In one verbal and physical gesture, these fans had expressed the whole hot dog experience.

Similar expressions can be found at hot dog stands throughout the world. What makes this so is not just the special taste qualities of the sausage and accoutrements, but the culture that surrounds them. Hot dogs have been embedded in American culture through folklore and commerce since the end of the nineteenth century. The term ‘hot dog’ was applied to common, industrially made sausages that became popular in an era of considerable change in American society. Heavy immigration from Europe, the rise of truly large urban centres, new mass entertainments, enhanced information technologies all combined to create a much-desired new national identity, the legendary ‘American melting pot’. The hot dog became the symbol of that identity, and was often tied to American national sport at the time. It is no accident that, in 1975, a car manufacturer branded itself with the memorable jingle: ‘Hot dogs, baseball, apple pie and Chevrolet.’ When Americans eat hot dogs in public places they are celebrating their common identity, making the little sausages all the better-tasting.

Introduction:

What is a Hot Dog?

A hot dog belongs to the ancient family of encased foods. But unlike stuffed vegetables such as peppers or aubergines, dolmas, enchiladas or the Mexican mixiotes, for example, the hot dog is a product encased in animal gut, or an artificial facsimile. Among the sub-families of such foods are all-meat products (some with non-meat additives), hybrid meat and grain combinations (such as haggis or East European kishka) and a special group of more recent ‘hot dog’ creations based on the likes of fish or vegetable proteins, usually textured soy products, wheat gluten or even fungi. Of the latter, imitation of shape alone makes them part of the greater ‘stuffed’ taxon, much like the recently evolved ‘skinless’, or formerly encased, products.

The original hot dog is one of the clan of processed meats, more specifically a sausage, and of a certain size (bologna is certainly a sausage that is never confused with a hot dog, no matter how close the ingredients). As for meats, the primal hot dog is made from red meat – if pork and veal are included in that group. Poultry is a late addition, officially designated a meat by the US Department of Agriculture in 1996, and was not included in older definitions of ‘meat’ in the same way that fish was not. The hot dog species of sausage might be defined as an ‘emulsified’, or very finely chopped or ground meat product. As a further subspecies, the hot dog is a precooked sausage. In its truly defined state, the hot dog is meant to be eaten out of the hand encased in a bun (though other baked products can and are sometimes used). In this sense, the hot dog crosses food categories and becomes one of America’s singular foods, a sandwich. Few hot dogs are consumed ungarnished, except perhaps by squeamish children or health-conscious diners.

The American hot dog began life among European immigrants in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its direct origins are among several types of German sausages handmade by individual butchers. To this day, the names of two types are used interchangeably with hot dogs: frankfurters (alias ‘franks’) and wieners (or ‘weenies’), though the Thuringer might also be a hot dog model. Some other sausage traditions bear influence on the hot dog. Among these are Anglo-American pork sausages, sometimes called ‘hot links’, French boudins, especially in French-speaking areas of North America such as New Orleans and Quebec, ‘Polish’ sausages, still one of the variations served at hot dog stands, and ‘Italian’ sausages, also regularly eaten in a bun. Although they share a common tubular morphology, most of these vary from the hot dog in texture, flavour and processing: many are uncooked, for example. What distinguishes the hot dog from its more distant relatives mentioned here is its fine texture which, in turn, is due to processing technologies developed during the nineteenth century. It also has a cultural and social history all its own.

What is in a hot dog depends on the group and specific type; like domestic canines, there are many variations and each descends from more generic ancestors. The most common are pork, or pork and poultry mixtures, sold in retail packs in supermarkets and as food service items in mass public venues. They are soft-textured, skinless and often marketed to children. Examples include such national brands as Oscar Mayer, Ballpark, Armour and many regional copies.

An ideal hot dog with onions, relish and decorative mustard.

Everyone loves hot dogs. Nikita Khrushchev’s celebrated visit to the USA in 1956 saw him with a red hot (another term for a hot dog).

The other main group have been called ‘adult’ hot dogs by the companies that make them. Most are all-beef, either gut-encased or skinless, with more texture and more complex flavour profiles. Though some have national distribution due to acquisition by large food corporations – notably Hebrew National and Nathan’s – most of these hot dogs remain ensconced in the culture of cities through such companies as Vienna Beef, Sabrett, Boar’s Head, Pearl, Farmer John All-Beef Premium and others.

An older but less popular type is made from animal parts not usually thought fit for human consumption. Often labelled ‘hot links’ or, as one notable brand has it, ‘Hillbilly Franks’. These contain items such as cheeks, lips, lungs, glands, fillers and red dye.

Just as plants and animals have been subjected to genetic manipulation by the injection of genes from other species, the hot dog has been modified. So popular have cheese toppings for these sausages become that companies have invented dogs filled with dairy product. Americans love melted cheese on everything, hence the popularity of Velveeta cheese (a cheese product sold by Kraft Foods since 1927) which acts like a thick gravy. The new products are injected with a soft cheese product filling, some with additional flavouring such as jalapeño peppers, so as to retain the hot dog’s status as a hand-held food, avoiding messy toppings. In this iteration, the sausage has become the casing.

The composition of the dominant hot dog styles around the world is as follows: in its mass-produced commercial form, the hot dog is made with finely chopped meat, usually pork or a pork-poultry mixture – a kind of meat slurry called an ‘emulsion’ or ‘batter’– and is either skinless or has a natural casing made of gut or collagen. It has by law a maximum 30 per cent fat and is often seasoned with spices, paprika (for colouring) or red (cayenne) pepper, sometimes sugar but more often corn syrup, black pepper, somewhere between 1.75 and 2.25 per cent salt and sodium nitrite. Legally, the hot dog is permitted some percentage of filler, normally non-fat dried milk but also powdered bonemeal. The resulting product is smoked with hickory, the usual wood flavouring of choice, or, often, artificial liquid smoke. These elements are subject to variations according to manufacturer and precise flavourings are closely guarded company secrets. Nonetheless, in terms of taste, most would be hard pressed to tell the differences between the major brands of hot dogs. The main sensory impression one gets from eating a hot dog plain is juiciness carried by the fat and water (roughly 50 per cent of the sausage), salt and perhaps some subtle hints of the seasonings, depending on the kind of product it is. In the better hot dog, flavour and tactile senses are inextricably combined.

Two ideal hot dog styles, one topped with french fries, the other classic Chicago.

‘Cooking’, or rather heating, methods for hot dogs also vary, often by group. For example, Chicago’s all-beef hot dogs are best bathed in hot water, New York’s all-beef natural-casing dogs flat grilled, while the mostly pork products are often roller-grilled. Other sausage types served at hot dog restaurants, usually coarse-textured Polish or very large all-beef versions sometimes called ‘knockwurst’, can be grilled over open flames or a flat grill. One type of hot dog, found mainly in New Jersey, is deep fried. Outside the restaurant environment, hot dog cookery varies widely, from microwaving to grilling on open flames outdoors. Except for the hot water-bathed hot dog, all are really re-cooked to achieve a certain texture and flavour. What is considered to be a ‘real’ hot dog varies from place to place, according to cooking/heating methods and individual tastes, the latter mainly coming from childhood experiences.

The hot dog is a cultural icon. It is associated with happy public events, families and children. It is one of the symbols by which Americans have identified themselves and to some extent still do. Or, as a poet might have said, ‘A hot dog, is a hot dog, is a hot dog, and American.’

I

Hot Dog History

The Sausage

The hot dog has several histories. One is the tangible story of sausages – how, where and when they were made. Another is the cultural history into which the hot dog is embedded. That, in turn, is related to the name ‘hot dog’ itself and here are two further histories: one is myth and has become legend; the other is the real tale in all its mundane glory.

Hot dogs are sausages and the origins of this great culinary creation are lost in the mists of time. The first chopped or processed meat encased in gut was the ancestral sausage. Current archaeological evidence suggests the existence of this kind of processed meat in the Upper Palaeolithic era, around 20,000 years ago, and certainly by the succeeding Mesolithic period some 10–13,000 years ago. These would have been meats cooked in skins over either open fires or, in the later period, in hot water-filled pits – the ancestor of the modern Scottish haggis.

Sausages evolved into their more familiar modern forms in several parts of the world but the hot dog’s origins lie in Western traditions. There is good reason to think that sausages were made in the early Western civilizations of south-western Asia (the Middle East), certainly by the first millennium BC when they appear in Assyrian sources.[1] Sausages were also established in the Mediterranean world in the same period. A well-known passage in Homer’s Odyssey, probably composed around 700 BC, possibly referring to a centuries-old dish, mentions a blood sausage. Considering the number of animal sacrifices and killing in the Iliad and Odyssey, blood sausage is appropriate.

At about the same time Homer and poets like him sang of heroic exploits, the Greeks were colonizing the Italian peninsula and Sicily. Whether they brought sausages to the native populations or not, these dishes were staples of later Roman cookery. A smoked variety called Lucanica appears in the famed collection of recipes attributed to the epicure, Apicius. Its name came from Lucania, an area partly colonized by the Greeks.[2]

Romans, in their turn, occupied regions of Western Europe. Their forts on the west bank of the Rhine from the time of Augustus brought them into contact with German-speaking people. Over the course of four centuries, Romans acculturated the peoples of the Rhine leaving cities such as Trier as commercial and administrative centres. It is doubtful that Roman butchers introduced Germans to the idea of sausages, since most Germanic peoples were not under Roman control and encased meats certainly go well back into their history, but it is not unreasonable to suppose that some Roman techniques lived on in the old cities long after the Empire had faded away.

Political regimes come and go, but sausages remain. There is plenty of evidence from the subsequent medieval period to show that sausages were common in diets. From Spain to Germany and eastwards into Russia, farmers (most of the population) raised pigs and made sausages from them. This was generally during winter, the meat and sausages preserved with salt or by smoking and meant to last until the next growing season or for the Easter feast. It is no wonder that the Land of Cockaigne, an imaginary place of plenty, had walls made of sausages, at least as recorded in a fourteenth-century English poem called ‘The Land of Cockaygne’. Visions of plenty remain in the iconography of sausages and American hot dog stands (see p. 84).

Sausages rich in fat were also specialities of butchers in the rising towns of the European Middle Ages. Though surviving sausage recipes dating to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries come mainly from the kitchens of aristocrats, they are similar enough to the products sold by butchers catering to ordinary folk.[3] The earliest discovered sausage regulations are of similar vintage. In 2007 a researcher in Weimar, Germany discovered a 1432 law relating to Thuringer Rostbratwurst.[4] Made of pork, it shares characteristics with Bavarian weisswurst in that it had to be eaten fresh, on the morning it was made. Sausages from German-speaking lands increasingly appear in records during succeeding centuries, in particular frankfurters and wieners. There are several origin stories for the former, some dating to the fifteenth or seventeenth centuries. Whatever they are, frankfurters may have started as cooked and smoked pork sausages, but were better known as pork and beef mixtures with distinctive seasonings (coriander among them) and special smoke flavours. By the late nineteenth century an all-beef version appeared, notably but probably not exclusively made by the Gref-Völsings sausage company. This is the version best known in the USA, though its specific connections to Frankfurt itself are unclear. Wieners, of similar vintage, are precooked ‘sausages from Vienna’. In European usage they are finely chopped beef, pork and veal mixtures. Made by proper Wurstmachers there is not much difference between frankfurters and wieners, save perhaps more garlic in the latter.[5] When translated to America and mass-produced, the word ‘wiener’ usually means a pork, pork and veal or nowadays pork and poultry mixture, mildly flavoured with a soft texture, more like a European cervelat or a precooked weisswurst, or in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American terms, bologna.

European sausage varieties number in the hundreds, including more than forty forms of bratwurst alone. While many were made for home consumption as main courses, others became part of public dining traditions. Among these were frankfurters, wieners, various bratwursts, generic saucisses (perhaps liver-based boudins) in France, kielbasas in Poland and others. To this day, some of these are served to be eaten in public with bread or on small split rolls, the most famous being Thuringers in Germany. Sausage vendors could be found in public places – markets and fairs – throughout Europe from the Middle Ages to the present. Naturally, immigrants to North America took their food traditions with them, and it is these sausages, particularly the German ones, that became the American hot dog.

The largest group of European migrants to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries hailed from the British Isles, taking with them their pork sausage traditions – bangers. English cookery books, such as Eliza Smith’s The Compleat Housewife, or Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion, the first such volume published in the colonies, had recipes for fresh pork sausage that are substantially the same as those made in rural American homes until late in the twentieth century. As Mrs Lettice Bryan shows in The Kentucky Housewife, this was a labour-intensive process – mincing meat, mixing with leaf lard, adding elaborate seasonings, preparing pig gut, stuffing and smoking – and the final product was meant for the table since the author recommends frying or grilling and serving with toast and melted butter.[6] These were not cheap street food, but they do show that sausages were culinary fixtures in the United States among many ethnic groups of European extraction.

Sausages have always served as street food, as in this illustration from 1790s France, of an ancestral hot dog sold by vendors.

And then sausages became industrialized. Prior to the American Civil War (1861–1865), sausage was made by hand in individual butcher shops. Thomas Farrington De Voe, surveying the markets of New York in 1867, wrote: ‘The best sausages are prepared altogether from pork, chopped small, seasoned, and run or stuffed into casins [gut casings].

Butcher-author Thomas Farrington De Voe, elegantly dressed and ready to cut meat in 1867.

Those made in the city are usually quite small in size, as the meat is run into the lamb casins shops.’ Two elements of the future hot dog caught De Voe’s attention: ‘There is danger, also, in the kind and quality of the flesh which some use, it being almost impossible to tell, from outward appearance, of what animal or in what condition the flesh was, when hid in those skins; and the only protection for the buyer is to purchase of those dealers who are certainly known to you, or else to buy the meat and prepare it yourself.’[7] Another product, ‘common pudding’, was sold to workmen: ‘These puddings are made of the pork skins, beeves’ head meat, pigs’ liver, etc., seasoned and stuffed into beef’s casins, and cooked. Sold at low prices.’[8] Mysterious ingredients have always been part of hot dog lore, hence the association with dogs. But in America cheap prices are sovereign.

Forty-four years later, Artemas Ward’s study of New York’s markets noted many kinds of sausages for sale. Among them were ‘Frankfort Sausages’ and ‘Wieners, or Vienna Sausages’. By then many of all types were made by machine.[9] Like so much else in America, food underwent industrialization in the post-Civil War period. Meat was one of the first food industries to be affected because of the monstrous carnivorous appetite of Americans. Chicago’s new Union Stock Yards (1865) brought animals in by rail and by the 1870s meat industrialists such as Swift, Armour, Morris, Hammond, Cudahy, Morrell (in Cincinnati), Hormel (Minnesota) and others devised efficient ways to slaughter, disassemble, render, process and ship products to national markets. Gustavus Swift once said that he used every part of the pig but the squeal.

Swift’s comment tells us about cheap sausages. A recipe in one sausage-maker’s book calls for pork and beef trimmings (skeletal meat), hearts, cheek and head meat. Other formulae call for tongue, lungs, glands and other undefined parts. The very cheapest sausages are described by Artemas Ward: ‘Cheaper grades contain a considerable percentage of potato flour, rice, bread or cracker meal, or other similar fillers, and the meat consists largely of “trimmings” – cheek meat, etc.– coloring matter being frequently employed to obtain the red hue desired.’ The early versions of hot dogs were surely sausages of this kind. Some still are.

What allowed meat packers to process scrap animal parts, offal and so on more efficiently – and thus increase profits – was the introduction of new processing machinery. The first steam-powered sausage meat chopper was introduced in 1868, cutting 100 pounds of meat in half an hour.[10] By the end of the century power choppers of several kinds, one the famous Bull Chopper, were in wide use. Powered sausage stuffers, linkers, curing, cooking and smoking methods had to wait until later in the twentieth century, and then hot dogs became truly a cheap mass-market commodity. It was just at this time of change in American food production that the hot dog got its name.

The Name: Mythologies

The term ‘hot dog’ is singularly American. It’s an example of whimsical American humour, a humour based on hard social realties and a human penchant for mythologies. And, since America is the land of salesmen, the name is a marketing tool. So named, the ‘hot dog’ is the American food.

The earliest use of the term ‘hot dog’ yet discovered is in the 28 September 1893 edition of the Knoxville Journal: ‘Even the wienerwurst men began preparing to get the “hot dogs” ready for sale Saturday night.’[11] Several ‘official’ stories of how the hot dog got its name have been widely circulated since the 1920s. The best known of these says as much about American ideas and culture as it does about supposed origins of the name.

It was April 1901, and cold even for that time of the year. The spectators in the small crowd at New York’s Polo Grounds were dressed in their heavy coats or sat shivering under stadium blankets. But inclement weather conditions never deterred real supporters of the New York Giants (San Francisco Giants since 1958) baseball team. Fans may have been hardy and true but they were few. Attendance for this doormat team had been in steady decline over the previous few years, a fact that would lead the newly formed American League to place a rival team in New York the following year – the Highlanders, later renamed Yankees. Giants championships and large crowds would arrive with the legendary manager John J. McGraw after 1902. New York is not a town for sports losers.

Like all baseball parks of the time, this one was wooden, so had limited seating capacities. It predated the better-known ‘modern’ ballpark of steel and concrete, built in 1911 on the same site after a fire destroyed the old wooden grandstand.[12] In major league cities all over the country dangerous old wooden ballparks began to be replaced in these years by steel-beamed stadia that themselves became archaic, almost all of them replaced.

The Giants supporters that April day had another way of keeping themselves warm: food. Long before the turn of the century food vendors were integral features of any American baseball park just as they were at any public event. Peanuts, chewing gum, cigars, soft drinks and ice cream were the foods of the day. Ball clubs usually granted concessionaires the rights to sell on their grounds. One of the most successful, Harry M. Stevens (an Englishman who developed the scorecard, a rabid Giants fan and personal friend of the great McGraw) had obtained the exclusive rights to the Polo Grounds in 1895. It was his vendors, the story goes, who on this day in New York were given a food item that has since become closely associated with baseball. And, the tale continues, that day the delicacy received its common name.

There are several versions of the story in circulation. In 1935 journalist Quentin Reynolds related what has become the standard account. Harry Stevens had stocked up on ice cream and soda in anticipation of a warm day. When the weather turned inclement, he thought fast. His son, Frank, had brought the subject up a few days earlier, and now Harry saw this as the right time to try it. ‘Send around to all the butchers in the neighbourhood… Buy up all of those German sausages you can, those long dachshund sausages – what do they call ’em, frankfurters. Then hustle around to the bakers in the neighbourhood and buy up all the rolls you can find. These people want something hot. We’ll give them something hot. And get some mustard.’ His men rushed out and soon returned bearing yards of ‘dachshund’ sausages. Stevens cooked these up in a small kitchen on the premises, placed each link in a roll and smeared mustard on them. He then ordered his vendors to call the new sandwich ‘red hots’. ‘Those people are freezing. They’ll want something hot.’ The boys marched through the stands calling out that they had red-hot dachshund sausages. Naturally, the crowd responded enthusiastically – by gobbling them as fast as they appeared in the vendors’ boxes.

Sitting in the press box that day the New York Journal’s T. A. Dorgan, or TAD, ‘greatest of newspaper cartoonists and phrasemaker extraordinary’, observed the scene. A regular feature of sports pages in those days, cartoonists who caricatured the action and characters of the games have long since been relegated to editorial or comic pages. As always, looking for something new, Dorgan was delighted by the sight of a sausage-frenzied crowd. In the Reynolds version, the cartoonist thinking about an angle for his cartoon reasoned that, since a dachshund is a dog, why not call the new dish a ‘hot dog’?: ‘and not long after in a cartoon, he immortalized the frankfurter which Stevens had naturalized, under the name of “hot dog”… ever since then hot dogs have been an integral adjunct of ball games, race tracks, six day bike events and fights.’[13]

Thomas A. Dorgan (TAD)’s first recorded hot dog cartoon, dating not to a 1902 baseball game, but to a 1906 six-day bicycle race.

Detail from TAD’s second hot dog cartoon, dating to 1906.

Almost none of this story is true, but there is enough to have made it plausible to readers in 1935 and it is still widely quoted today. The supposed initial cartoon has never been found, but one from a six-day bicycle race of 1906 shows a vendor selling ‘hot dogs’ for five cents each.[14] Nevertheless, Dorgan always claimed that this was the way it happened and the 1906 cartoon and several from later years commemorated that event. Because Dorgan had long been known as a ‘coiner’ of American slang phrases, including ‘kibitzer’, ‘twenty-three skidoo’ and ‘duck soup’ among others, attributing ‘hot dog’ to him seemed natural. Recent research shows that the word had in fact been in use from at least the mid-1890s. That sausages in buns were sold in public places, that baseball was wildly popular public entertainment, that concessionaires catered to the new-meaning immigrant-masses, and that a new, urban based language was growing up around all these elements are all real, but the Stevens-Dorgan story is about deeper American mythologies.

Harry Mozley Stevens, born in England in 1855, moved to Niles, Ohio in 1882 where he was employed as a steel mill worker. On strike in 1887, he became a door-to-door book salesman and thus found his true calling. Perhaps in that year, while attending a baseball game in Columbus, Ohio, Stevens realized that, without numbered jerseys, players could not easily be distinguished from each other – at least by the visitors – and so ‘invented’ the programme and scorecard, engendering the phrase, ‘You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.’ Box score cards had been an integral part of baseball since the 1850s, baseball being the supreme game of statistics, but they had not been commercially produced for mass fandom. After buying the scorecard concession at the ball park, the voluble Stevens apparently sold them at the 1887 world baseball championship between the St Louis Stockings of the American Association and the National League’s Detroit Wolverines. With modest success in hand, he expanded to other cities, notably New York by 1894, and extended his product line to include food, peanuts, fizzy drinks, popcorn and, eventually, hot sausages served in buns – the hot dog.

Detail from TAD’s 1915 hot dog cartoon.

Hot dogs were and are associated with sporting events, especially baseball. Here, players from the major league team Chicago White Sox gobble hot dogs at a ballpark stand, c. 1930.

By the time of his death in 1934, Stevens had built a catering empire. An obituary written for him by Grantland Rice (America’s most celebrated sportswriter of the time) said, ‘He could direct an effective hot dog one minute, and a minute later tear into Shakespeare, or Browning, or Keats. He was a merchant and a poet combined, but he was always a poet at heart… Above all, he had the striking type of personality that caught instant attention – the vital human spark that so few ever hold.’[15] This cheerful, larger-than-life immigrant-huckster-entrepreneur was the embodiment of a story that Americans of the time liked to hear.

There are few more cherished myths in American life than that of the rugged individual who, by wit, pluck and some luck, arrives at that prized moment of invention, gaining success and wealth in the process. Edison, Bell, McCormick and a host of others had, by the turn of the century, entered the pantheon of the gods of enterprise. Poll the fans at the park that day and one might hear, time and again, ‘only in America’ or ‘Yankee ingenuity’. Here is the notion of the rugged individualist, with all his or her eccentricities, who makes it on his own. Despite the ways most Americans have lived their lives in the Industrial Age – working for ever-larger economic entities – they cherish this concept. It carries through in popular culture and in some economic spheres. These are the little niches in the market, the realms of peddlers, small shopkeepers and hot dog sellers. As we shall see, many people in the hot dog business look at themselves in this light, as small people struggling to get ahead in a difficult business. To them, they are the last of the true American individualists. Such is the tale of Harry M. Stevens.

Fans of the pennant-winning 1920 Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team regale themselves with hot dogs before a game at Ebbett’s Field.

Individualism leads to a more general theme: American exceptionalism. Of all the world’s nations, Americans of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were told through the media and in schools that America alone was in the process of achieving material success and ultimate happiness without Europe’s problems of war and violence. Here was a land where the downtrodden of other continents – specifically Europe – could raise themselves. It was a land of natural riches, a field in which ‘[i]ndividualistic assertiveness and achievement were to be justified as values in themselves’.[16] Many of the Giants’ fans – and probably the players as well – thought as much for many were themselves the sons of poor immigrants. The story of the hot dog reflects all this. Once identified as a type, this sausage became wholly American, a thing that was invented in America and a means of self-identification for Americans. All the special qualities that go into the hot dog – fast food for enterprising people – spoke to Americans about their uniqueness. The Stevens story is a fable of that exceptionalism.

There is another related motif in the tale: public relations and advertising – the media by which the modern world is explained to us. What else is the Quentin Reynolds article but a bit of a boost for an old habitué of the Polo Grounds, his sons who succeeded him in the business and for T. A. Dorgan? Evidently Stevens himself was anything but a shrinking violet. His friendship with John McGraw and the New York Giants was clearly genuine but also a wonderful publicity resource. By the 1930s his catering company serviced so many sports venues that the name became synonymous with sports-arena food. The business of catering at such affairs is so competitive that companies will take any edge they can get. It is any wonder that journalists, ever on the lookout to ingratiate themselves with influential institutions and people, are eager to report such tales? Besides, it has all the features of an American success story. That is to say: what we often take to be true stories are the creations of public relations and advertising writers. They have become the modern myth-makers.

Two other origin tales are relevant and reflect similar ideas to the Harry M. Stevens story, though not in the name ‘hot dog’. One has to do with a famous event in American history, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, or St Louis World’s Fair, held in 1904. Twenty million visitors attended, eating at the forty-three restaurants and eighty quick-service dining spots. The story goes that a Bavarian sausage-seller named Anton Feuchtwanger loaned white gloves to his customers so that they could hold the steaming hot sausages he sold. Because few people returned the gloves, he supposedly asked his baker brother-in-law to create a solution to the purloined glove problem. It turned out to be a soft roll into which the sausage nestled, blanketed with mustard. Thus was the hot dog and hot dog bun invented.[17]

There is no evidence that this event ever took place. Sausage sandwiches were already more than a quarter of a century old. The story is one of several St Louis World’s Fair food origin myths – the hamburger, candyfloss, Dr Pepper, iced tea and peanut butter among them. The one exception seems to be the waffle ice cream cone, devised by a Lebanese immigrant. Immigrants and ethnicity is the real story. Feuchtwanger was a Bavarian in a city and region colonized by Germans from many regions of that country speaking differing dialects and with different religions. Bavaria was long known to be a place of good food, famous sausages (and beer), much like neighbouring Austria. Vienna lent its name to one of the sausages synonymous with hot dogs, the wiener, and would be used by food companies that wanted to impart an aura of high quality to its products (that is the real reason for the dainty white glove story). Oscar Mayer was one of the Bavarian sausage-makers who came to America; Chicago’s leading hot dog company is Vienna Beef – both were imported late in the nineteenth century. By that time, sausages made, sold and eaten in urban America, often as street food, were identified with Germans. The hot dog is fundamentally an ethnic dish.

A more plausible and better documented tale is that of Charles Feltman. Another German immigrant, he arrived in Brooklyn in the 1860s and, according to the standard account, began selling pies from a wagon at a beach resort called Coney Island. Newly linked to the cities of Brooklyn and New York by rail and trolley, people came to beat the heat of city summers. Finding that potential customers wanted hot sandwiches, Feltman, in 1867 or 1874, was said to have asked a wheelwright to make him a wagon with a burner unit in it. With this device, a pot of water could be heated, sausages plonked in and then set into sliced ‘milk’ buns. Here, too, is a story of hot dog origin, if not in name then in product.[18]

In fact, Charles Feltman was a restaurateur whose large and elaborately decorated Ocean Pavilion was a fine dining establishment located on the boardwalk from perhaps 1871. Recent research shows that Feltman, a baker, decided to open a bakery–restaurant after a visit to the newly developing Coney Island. Not only did he not operate a hot dog stand but in 1886, along with other businessmen, he complained bitterly about the number of small booths that had sprung up, saying that ‘sausage must go’.[19]

By the late nineteenth century, Coney Island, in Brooklyn, New York, had become one of America’s most famous beach resorts. Its boardwalk was home to amusement parks and food stands that served hot dogs, such as this one in 1904.

The apocryphal Feltman story is, once again, that of a cheap, portable comestible served to a wide public at popular venues. It is also a story of ethnicity and entrepreneur-ship in America. It is one better told by the career of Ignatz Frischmann, a German who arrived in New York before 1850 and who died in 1904. Research has found that in his obituaries he was described as a pioneer baker who helped make Coney Island and its Bowery (a street loaded with amusement places, tobacco stores and shops that served frankfurters hot from the grill and boiled corn, among other delights) famous. His small bakery ‘started the manufacture of a certain oblong roll that the frankfurter men needed for their business’. The obituary goes on to say that frankfurter stands fill every corner of the island and that no visit is complete without having downed one of these culinary treats.[20] Even in 1904, the sausage described is a frankfurter, not a hot dog, and many in the business were Germans (or, as we shall see, Ashkenazi Jewish). In the history of hot dogs, ethnicity and entrepreneurship count.

Coney Island was so famous for amusements – and for refreshments – that the dog-in-sausage joke worked well, if grimly, as in this undated cartoon. Note that the words ‘Red Hot’ and ‘Frankfurters’ appear, as does sauerkraut as a condiment, all early New York usages.

The Name: Reality

Since the dawn of sausages, consumers have been suspicious about their contents: Sweeney Todd’s meat pies have nothing on sausage-makers of old. Dogs have long been at the top of the list of suspected ingredients, followed by cats, rats and humans. Before the rise of canine sentimentalism in the nineteenth century, when dogs became surrogate children in middle-class households, they played a more functional role in society as consumers of vermin, garbage and excrement. Packs of stray dogs could be found in any city – and who would be the wiser if they disappeared into sausage machines?

From early in the nineteenth century, newspapers described American scepticism about the purity of their sausages, with stories of dead rats, pigs and dogs being used as ingredients. Stray dogs may have been regarded as filthy vermin, but pet dogs were another matter. Their imagined disappearance was the subject of mordant jokes and cartoons throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century.[21] Dog sausage jokes made their way onto the stage and into print with such ditties as ‘Der Deitcher’s Dog’, published by Septimus Winner in 1864 to a traditional German folk tune. The song, in a tipsy, comic German accent, is widely known to this day as ‘Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?’[22]

Oh where, Oh where ish mine little dog gone;

Oh where can he be.

His ears cut short und his tail cut long:

Oh where, Oh where ish he.

Un sasage ish goot, bolonie of course,

Oh where can he be.

Dey makes um mit dog und dey makes em mit horse,

I guess de makes em mit he.

Other songs say the same thing: ‘Dutch’ (meaning German in America, as in Pennsylvania Dutch) butchers threw dogs into hot dog-making machines.[23] If such jokes appeared in print and song, they must surely have reflected opinions held by many, perhaps most, Americans. A good number of sausage jokes from the mid-nineteenth century until perhaps the Second World War centre on Germans for the simple reason that German immigrants brought their sausage-based food culture with them and are forever identified with it (along with cabbage, or ‘kraut’). Small wonder that German dogs would later be linked to sausages, as in the Stevens story: ‘Buy up all of those German sausages you can, those long dachshund sausages – what do they call ’em, frankfurters.’

Cover page of Septimus Winner’s 1864 song, ‘Der Deitcher’s Dog’, or ‘Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?’ Into a sausage, of course!

This was an era of ethnic jokes and dialect comedians. Every minority or newly arrived immigrant group would be the subject of such humour and food was almost always part of the caricature. White performers with blacked-up faces had long eaten watermelon and fried chicken while playing banjos, the Irish were caricatured as reeking of corned beef, cabbage and whiskey, the Chinese as jabbering unintelligibly and eating chop suey, the Italians for eating spaghetti and guzzling red wine; Jews were ridiculed for kosher dietary laws, and Germans for swilling beer, eating sausages and ‘talking funny’ – and who knew what went into their signature food?

The term ‘hot dog’ as applied to a sausage in a bun made its first appearance in college humour magazines in the mid-1890s. Lexicographer David Shulman thought there was a connection between hot dog as a sharp dresser or good athlete, or show-off (still one use of the phrase) and sausages sold by lunch wagons.[24] This was later demonstrated by Barry Popik using Yale University college magazines from 1895. In them a new lunch wagon called ‘The Kennel Club’ appears (the name also applies to a well-known Yale clothier) giving rise to the phrase ‘Dog Wagon’, followed closely by ‘hot dog’. One lyric goes: ‘’Tis dogs’ delight to bark and bite, thus does the adage run. But I delight to bite the dog when placed inside a bun.’[25] Now, the ‘hot dog’ was really born.

From these magazines the term spread rapidly. An editorial reply to a letter to the April 1897 edition of the Kansas City Star says: ‘A “hot dog” is a sliced bun and wienerwurst. The origin of the term goes back to the current facetiousness of university towns.’ A story in an April 1899 edition of the same newspaper cites a story from the New York Sun regarding the now famous Yale ‘dog wagons’, specifically the Yale Kennel Club Lunch Wagon: ‘The wagon itself is a gorgeously painted affair, the foundation color being true Yale blue. Upon it are panels bordered in red and green and yellow representing all manner of dogs, but principally hounds and dachshunds. Stained glass windows ornament the front and ends, with dogs’ heads as the chief decorative subject – “Memorial windows” the Yale men call them.’[26]

Dog-in-sausage jokes were a staple of American and European humour from at least the nineteenth century. This one dates from 1880.

Within a few years the name ‘hot dog’ had spread to other eastern colleges and then seeped into popular culture. The reason was simple: it was a funny joke and accorded with topical humour. Cartoons depicting dogs being processed in sausage-making machines were fairly common by the 1890s. Shortly thereafter such gruesomely amusing pictures were joined by those of dogs being eaten in buns, or about to be eaten, fearful of being consumed, happy to be food, and so on. Dogs are still eaten – mostly the German’s favourite pooch, the dachshund – on hot dog stand signs and advertising across North America.

The new ‘hot dog’ fitted into many other elements of popular culture, one in which newly fashionable terms were spreading nationally. The term ‘red hot’ (dog) soon followed and has been used interchangeably with ‘hot dog’ ever since. The word ‘hot’ was hot in the 1890s as witnessed by the phrase ‘hot dog’ applied to people and such songs as Joe Hayden and Theodore Metz’s ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’, the virtual theme song of the Spanish–American War (1898) and known by everyone thereafter. By that decade, at least, the phrase also meant hot summer days, going back to the ancient Roman phrase, ‘dog days of summer’, named after Sirius, the Dog Star. ‘Hot’ also applied to popular songstresses, such as Sophie Tucker (1884– 1966) who, using argot for a woman of ill-repute, was billed as ‘The Last of the Red Hot Mamas’. From the start, sexual innuendos have always been part of hot dog culture: the word ‘weenie’, dating to the 1920s, is testimony to that.

The ‘hot dog’ joke entered the standard fare of German dialect comedians who appeared on vaudeville stages across America and also defused fears of both immigrants and sausage manufacturers. ‘Carl Pretzel’ was such a type in the 1870s and 1880s. Charles H. Harris, a Chicago journalist, invented this comic fellow who spoke in thick dialect and discussed life and goings-on in the city.[27] This kind of accented commentary was followed up by the famous observations of Mr Dooley, delivered to his creator, Finley Peter Dunne, in a thick Irish brogue. So numerous were Germans and Irish immigrants by the latter part of the century that a kind of mixed German–Irish dialect comedy was spoken. (Of the 62 million Americans in the 1890 census, 2,784,894 were German-born and 1,871,509 Irish. Many preceded them, and many followed from the Old Country. Today roughly one in six Americans claim German ancestry.) Vaudeville patter is a key to why new coinages became popular. In Walt Whitman’s phrase, this was the urban slang, and ‘the equality of the gutter’.[28]

Another cartoon joke, from 1907 Los Angeles. ‘Oh where, oh where has my poodle dog gone?’ asks the girl of the butcher out east. ‘Search me’, says the ‘Butch’ in discouraging tone, ‘I never sausage a beast.’

This kind of urban lingo and music spread across the country through venues of popular culture via stage shows, the new phonograph, in print, sports, amusement parks and fairs in the years after 1890–1900. For example, newspapers throughout the United States received and printed stories from other parts of the country, especially cities such as New York. That is how a story about the Yale ‘Dog Wagon’ appeared in a Kansas City newspaper and how a couple of years before the same paper mentioned the use of the word ‘hot dog’ on college campuses. Wire services sped up information transfer.

Syncopated music, slang words and phrases were adapted rapidly because they seemed ‘right’ to ordinary people. It has been said that ‘twenty-three skidoo’, a saying possibly invented by T. A. Dorgan, coming from ‘skedaddle’, cognate with ‘scram’ and meaning ‘to leave rapidly’ , comes straight from urban streets and a period when transportation was becoming increasingly rapid. Americans became sports-crazed and sport became fast – from boxing to baseball, the latter described as swiftly played and intensely exciting, thus the very symbol of the new America. The hot dog and the name for it appeared within this milieu. It was black humour from the streets – fast, hot and meant for a mass market.

And, not to be overlooked, sausages in buns were becoming immensely popular at public events because they were cheap (five cents was the standard price for many years), easy to handle and tasted good. Harry M. Stevens certainly thought so. He must have realized, as did the many street vendors, that ready-made sausages were a perfect portion-controlled food. By knowing the exact size and weight of a product and having it available with minimal preparation time, manufacturers and vendors knew exactly how much profit could be made on each item and how many could be sold in a given time.

Others realized this as well. Not only did the name spread across the country quickly, but so did the hot dog stands. Within the first decade of the twentieth century, hot dogs and hot dog carts appeared on the west coast, in the San Francisco Bay area and in the south. In 1913 Atlanta, for example, Greek-owned hot dog carts were said to clog the main streets. Hot dog street vendors could be seen on the streets of New York (where they were declared legal), Chicago (where they were discouraged or outlawed), Detroit, Cincinnati, New Orleans and other cities. It was a combination of hot dog vendors, popular entertainment, new slang words and marketing prowess by entrepreneurs that created the name and substance of the American hot dog.

The classic ubiquitous New York hot dog cart. Note the umbrella, a feature of many hot dog carts.

2

How Hot Dogs are Made

Machinery

The hot dog is an industrial food. Small butcher shops make their own hand-crafted sausages – usually aided by machinery of some sort – but the commercial product sold by the billion across the world is made in large quantities by machinery in a virtually automated process.

This process is neatly summarized by the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. Meat trimmings – muscle meat, not scraps – are put into high-speed choppers with spices, curing agents and ice. The mixture is finely ground into an emulsion or batter and pumped into an automatic stuffer/linker machine, where it is crammed into casings. Some casings are natural gut, the original kind, but most casings are made of cellulose. These artificial casings are eventually stripped off to make skinless hot dogs, by far the most popular variety. The sausages are cooked and smoked in a smokehouse.[1]

None of this happened all at once and therein lies some history. Chopping meat is an arduous process but an old one. Imagine some ancestral Homo erectus chopping an animal’s thigh meat with a large Acheulian hand axe: that has been the basic technology by which meat has been cut. Classic sausages are made of chopped meat (sometimes called ‘ground’ though not literally pulverized as that term implies, or ‘minced’), some with additives, and to produce large amounts of sausage the meat must be mechanically chopped. The modern hot dog is a very finely chopped product that is turned into a slurry-looking mixture called an ‘emulsion’ or ‘batter’ (a better description for the unappetizing raw material) in the industry, and ‘comminuted’ in official and scientific parlance. This kind of processing can only come from mechanical devices and these began to appear in the USA in the early nineteenth century. The earliest, dating to the 1820s, were choppers using up and down motions and another in 1845 with a screw feeding meat into rotating knives. These seem to be hand-operated, much like home table meat grinders or food processors.

Once power was added, the commercial sausage industry really took off. Power choppers of the knife type appeared in American meat plants in the 1860s. Some were German in design – throughout the whole period Germans were leaders in meat technology. Others were American. In 1853, S. Millet patented the first bowl cutter. It was a revolving bowl with knives sweeping across the meat held within.[2] Other choppers used bowls or tubs in variations of the basic Millet design. The first steam-driven meat chopper was invented in 1868 by John E. Smith and could process 100 pounds of sausage meat in half an hour.[3] These were later improved by powered combined choppers and mixers, called ‘silent cutters’ in the 1890s, by companies such as the Cincinnati Butcher Supply Company, and in 1905, the famous Hobart Buffalo electric (bowl) chopper. By the 1920s, choppers were up to about 2,400 pounds per hour.[4] Water and ice were necessary because the choppers ran hot and had the benefit, to the processors, of adding weight to the final product, rather like the pumping of water into hams and poultry. By the turn of the century huge amounts of meat, trim (basically fat) and scraps could be chopped and ready for sausage machines. In 1935 Usinger’s in Milwaukee boasted that its silent cutter had six blades revolving at 1,500 times per minute to reduce hundred of pounds of meat to sausage size.

Most sausages were sold over the counter in customer-friendly shops – nothing like what went on in the factory.

But not everything was fully automated yet, nor was it all safe:

You see in the old days the choppers and mixers were open. The closer the sausage maker could come to the blade, the better the meat could turn so that the seasonings would mix, the better. If you lost one finger you were a great sausage maker, if you lost 2 you were magna cum laude and if you lost 3 you were summa cum laude. In the old days lots of sausage makers had fingers missing.[5]

Hand-stuffing sausage at the Armour factory, Chicago, 1890s.

Until well into the twentieth century the process of stuffing sausages was still done by hand, hence time consuming and relatively costly to the producer. Hand stuffing literally means running the finely chopped ingredients into a casing. Mechanisms are cylinders with a tube at one end, onto which a casing is set, and a plunger at the other. The meat is shoved into the casing to the desired length of the sausage and then the sausages are tied off at the appropriate lengths, according to size. After smoking and cooking, these can be sold as linked sausages – very common in earlier years – or cut and packaged individually. These kinds of sausages are not exact in size, so it took a practised eye to make them as uniform as possible. As Horowitz points out, sausage linking was a skilled job usually employing women who had incredible dexterity,[6] but machines can always be made to do things faster, if not better.

Production was sped by more technological innovations in stuffing, casings and packaging. Steam-powered stuffers appeared in the 1890s, electric ones soon after. But manual linking was still common until new machines made by FAMCO (Allen Gauge and Tool Company) of Pittsburgh appeared in the 1930s, then fully implemented in the post-Second World War era when all technical problems had been overcome. When Swift and Company showed new automated sausage-making systems at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, this new linking technology, along with others, was integrated into one unit.[7]

By 1905 sausage-making was becoming somewhat automated. At the Swift Company in 1905, casings were stuffed at the rate of 10 feet per second.

These changes, in part, depended on new ways to make casings. Early hot dogs used natural casings – indeed, these are still used in premium iterations. Casings were made from animal guts (pigs, sheep and cattle). Each have different sizes: sheep casings smaller than pig casings and this perhaps is the reason why wieners, using sheep casings, have usually been sized at eight or six to a pound. Guts are the remains of animal slaughter. In the new centralized slaughtering operation of the post Civil War period, guts became a large business and a dirty one. Cleaning them – by intensive scraping and washing – meant working with truly odoriferous products. Large processors such as Armour and Swift in Chicago sent their casings to Cincinnati to be processed and then returned to be used in sausages. Gut casings tend to be delicate, never exactly uniform in size and expensive. Alternatives were highly desirable and these came in the 1920s when Chicagoan Erwin O. Freund invented cellulose casings made from purified cotton cellulose. The idea was to fill tubes of film made by this process with meat batter, to cook and smoke the product and then strip off the casing. Freund’s Visking Corporation (now Viskase) in this way created a new product category, the skinless hot dog, to the regret of many a hot dog purist.

Today’s hot dogs are overwhelmingly skinless but, in order to eat them, inedible collagen casings have to be stripped off the sausages. Since this is inconvenient for retailers, stripping has to be done in the plants – by hand before the Second World War. Once again, this was a limiting factor in production, so high-speed peeling machines appeared after the Second World War and are now standard. The faint line down a hot dog taken from a retail package is the result of the peeling machine knife that slits the casing as the hot dogs speed by on conveyor machinery. Problems with speed and casings (listeria bacteria can contaminate the hot dogs at the peeling blade) have led to many attempts to create skinless hot dogs without using skins. Swift and Company introduced a product in 1960 that was made by placing the meat batter into moulds and forming them with an electric current. This was a variation of the old and flavour-killing trick of cooking a hot dog by putting an electric current through it using wires attached at each end of the sausage. Consumers disliked these because their beloved hot dogs did not have the customary tapered ends.[8] Since then a number of technologies for similar production methods have been attempted.

By 1927 sausage-making was done under more sanitary conditions, but the rate of production was still 10 feet per second and labour intensive.

The greatest changes in sausage production occurred in the late 1950s and ’60s with continuous flow processing. Like Swift in 1939, manufacturers had been tinkering with ways to make hot dogs in one smooth and fast-running flow. Oscar Mayer led the way when Edward C. Sloan, head of Oscar Mayer’s corporate research department, brought together a team that was to find a way to make more hot dogs in their Wisconsin plants without building new factories. With the goal of producing at least 5,000 hot dogs per hour, engineers brought together existing technologies from chopping and mixing to cooking and packaging into an integrated operation that the company dubbed the ‘wiener tunnel’ or ‘hot dog highway’, largely because the sausages flowed through ten lanes that resembled the new American superhighway system. Meat went in at one end and about an hour later finished hot dogs, packed in new anaerobic packaging (Saran Wrap), were ready to go – at the rate of perhaps 10,000 an hour. Oscar Mayer’s innovations were almost simultaneous with the new Frank-A-Matic invented by Ray Townsend of Townsend Engineering in Des Moines, Iowa. Like the wiener tunnel, the Frank-A-Matic was a continuous process system that produced 36,000, and later 56,000, hot dogs per hour. Today, Townsend makes machines using the batter in and gel-coated system by which some 90 per cent of America’s commercial hot dogs are made.

What’s in a Hot Dog?

Frankfurters and wieners are traditionally meat products classified as cooked sausages.[9] To make these in traditional ways, the meat must be ‘cured’ or pickled before processing. Before about 1900, that meant brining meat for several weeks, then chopping it, stuffing casings, smoking, hanging and cooking the sausage. The procedure could take thirty days in all.[10] This is not a good way to make a product meant for mass markets, so new curing methods were devised by chemists such as Heller and Company in Chicago, and perfected during the century. The final ‘fast cure’ method means chopping the meat while adding cure, spices and other ingredients at the same time, followed by smoking and cooking. These processes allow the sausage to be made in a matter of hours. The cure itself has usually been a mixture of salt (no more than 4 per cent), along with sodium or potassium nitrate (the latter also called saltpetre), or sodium or potassium nitrite. These produce nitric oxide that combines with the meat pigment myoglobin to produce colour in the sausage. Nitrites also protect meat products from botulism and rancidity, thus allowing flavours to remain intact.[11] Ascorbic acid or sodium erythrobate are often added to the mixture because they speed the curing action. Speed in processing means money for the processor.

Hot dog flavours are by no means uniform, each manufacturer having their own closely held proprietary spice mixture. Some differences arise from a company’s ethnic origins, others from market considerations. Oscar Mayer products tend to be bland because they are sold by the millions, and marketed to children.[12] Others are spicier, some with more complex flavours such as the Chicago style, or more garlic-laden as in New York, New England and Detroit. By and large, better frankfurters will have salt, garlic, onion, pepper, coriander, nutmeg or mace, and perhaps paprika, all-spice and marjoram. In the 1920s, Heller and Company advertised its Zanzibar-Brand Frankfurter Sausage Seasoning, no doubt named after the Zanzibar cloves it contained. Whether this was spicier than others is not known, but it does give an impression of sausages with interesting flavours.

The composition of hot dogs differs from place to place and from maker to maker. For example, in some European versions, frankfurters are all pork, while wieners are mixtures of pork, beef and sometimes veal.[13] In the United States, frankfurters are usually mainly beef products, while wieners are usually pork, sometimes with veal, and in recent years with poultry. Most good ‘adult’ hot dogs are made purely from skeletal meat, that is, animal muscle. In the case of all-beef products in the United States, such as those made by the Vienna Beef Company in Chicago or Sabrett, Boar’s Head or Hebrew National in New York, the beef traditionally mainly came from northern-raised bulls. Colder climates and grass feeding, plus male hormones, made for a more fibrous meat that left more texture in the final sausage. (Southern beef was thought by old-time sausage-makers to have too much moisture and straight steer meat lacks binding power).[14] The companies still use bull beef for a texture that gives ‘bite’, ‘tear resistance’ or chewiness to the hot dog. These qualities are the main reasons for using natural casings – they give a definite ‘snap’ to the product.

Texture and binding qualities are the main reasons skeletal, muscle meats are preferred in the better franks and wieners. But, as in days past, lots of other elements, animal-based and otherwise appear in sausages. One of Heller’s formulae for Vienna or Frankfurter Sausage calls for pork trimmings, pork hearts, pork cheek and beef cheek along with ‘Bull-Meat-Brand Flour’ which was used as a binder. The US federal regulations require labels that say ‘with byproducts’ or ‘with variety meats’ where relevant and describe them as ‘comminuted, semisolid sausages consisting of not less than 15 per cent of one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle meat with raw meat byproducts, or not less than 15 per cent of one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle meat with raw meat byproducts and raw or cooked poultry products’.[15] Ingredients that can go in these products include ‘tripe, tongues, livers, blood or blood plasma, brains, lungs, udders (nonlactating), spleens, suet and cod and brisket fat, pig stomachs, gelatinous skins, pig backfat and caul fat, ears, snouts, ox lips etc.’[16] Because most Americans are notoriously squeamish about what goes into their hot dogs, products labelled with these ingredients are sold in niche markets, namely the south and south-west and to African-Americans in other areas of the country. Animal byproducts are dietary staples among this population.

Most Americans do consume commodified hot dogs with ingredients such as mechanically separated chicken, pork, water, corn syrup, modified food starch, salt, flavouring, potassium lactate, sodium lactate, sodium phosphate, dextrose, sodium diacetate, beef, hydrolyzed soya protein, sugar, sodium nitrite, sorbitol and extract of paprika. Mechanically separated meat, or MSM, is a manufacturing technique by which bones that have not been completely trimmed by hand are pressed through a strainer under high pressure so that all remnants of protein are pulled off into a kind of thick slush. Poultry does not bind well – cooking turns it into something like a quenelle, so it must have things added to it. Other lower-protein meats are similar in character. Soya protein concentrate is added as a binder, while food starches and corn syrup are fillers that help absorb water and add texture (soft). Other ingredients are used as preservatives and flavourings. Some hot dogs use fillers such as powdered milk, corn or potato flour and other carbohydrates as ways to make cheaper and texturally acceptable products. Often food colouring is used, sometimes paprika, but some still use an older technique – red dye. Before federal regulations banned several kinds of red dye because they were discovered to be carcinogenic in large amounts, they were used to make ‘red hots’ red. Carl Gylfe recalls eating them in the 1930s in one of Chicago’s major league baseball parks: ‘The spots that got on your shirt from those David Bergs [a Chicago hot dog brand] never came out. You had to use scissors to get them off. They had a lot of red dye in them. They were red hots and were sold as red hots and dye was acceptable in those days.’[17] Red dye remained in use in the southern US states for many years and hot dogs marketed in that region still use red colouring, albeit of a safer variety.

The reasons for the evolution of production techniques and ingredients match the evolution of American food in general – from handcrafted sausages made by European master butchers to commodity products made by machines, using ever cheaper industrial materials. But, even here, in the midst of factory food, there is room for individuality, as we shall see.

3

How Hot Dogs are Sold

Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,

That is what I truly want to be,

’Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener,

Everyone would be in love with me.

Advertising jingle, 1963

Purveyors

Hot dogs are marketed basically in two ways: through food service outlets and by packaged food retailers. In the early days of hot dogs, sausages could be anonymous – the sausage-maker not named – in the food-service business: street vendors were themselves the ‘brand’. Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the same could be said for package retailers since sausages were not packaged or labelled but were sold in long links that were usually piled up on the butcher’s counter or hung on hooks behind the display and serving area. This kind of retailing went on until the latter part of the twentieth century, even in the food sections of department stores such as Macy’s in New York and others around the country.

Local butchers’ shops did the same, and in an era when independent butchers in many American neighbourhoods made their own sausages, they were their own brands. A good number of now standard commercial brands began as butcher shops, Oscar Mayer, Hygrade (Ballpark Franks) and Bryan among them.

Before modern restaurants and sanitary food-selling, sausages were street food. This vendor in Vienna has a sausage-warmer and a basket of rolls and pretzel breads, c. 1910–20.

The street vendor selling from a cart or motorized ‘lunch wagon’ is the inheritor of the old hot dog food-service tradition. Food carts are urban and arose in cities with large populations of Germans and other Europeans. All of the older cities of America shared similar street food cultures and for similar reasons – to feed working people cheaply. Each city’s street food history played out differently because local ordinances played a major role in dictating the ways in which sausages were sold. New York City, with huge southern Italian and Jewish populations, the latter newly arrived from Eastern Europe, permitted pushcarts. By 1904 more than 6,700 licences had been granted, not all for food, but a good number were.[1] An eyewitness put it this way: ‘Cooked food, steaming hot, is sold from pushcarts. A special sheet-iron cart about the size of a dry-goods box, having drawers on one side, similar to a bureau, and with a smokestack, is used. These carts are properly referred to as “automobile” push carts.’[2]

The author of the piece then remarks that no one had been arrested for violating the new anti-smoke ordinances. Remove the belching smokestack and these New York carts are substantially the same now. In short, after any number of official investigations, health authorities in New York City concluded that push carts were no more dangerous to public health than any restaurant. Not so in Chicago and other cities, where for many years local laws strictly forbade food pushcart operations ostensibly because of lack of running water for sanitation and, in fin de siècle Chicago, for fear that dried faecal matter from the city’s many dray horses would pollute the food. Chicago had long-standing fears of sewage-based disease because, until the 1920s, sewage flowed down the Chicago River into Lake Michigan, the city’s potable water source. Only when the Chicago River had been reversed did anxieties abate. Nor did it help food cart operators that fixed-location businesses – restaurants mainly – in the Loop (the heart of the city) persuaded the city council to issue bans on these moveable feasts.

In many places push carts were replaced by more permanent food stands in the 1920s and ’30s. The word ‘stand’ is something of a misnomer, implying as it does a temporary structure or perhaps only a counter. In Chicago, which has the greatest concentration (2,500–3,000), the label ‘hot dog stand’ is applied to permanent locations. That they originated as temporary stands or even pushcarts is to be seen in their traditional architecture: a box with a service window and perhaps small counter. New York, in contrast, has very few permanent hot dog stands, for here is the home of the pushcart (some 5,000 by repute). Cities and towns in other parts of the USA generally have relatively few of either type. The centre of Philadelphia, for instance, used to have only one mainly hot dog restaurant (not a stand in the local parlance) – Original Levis, founded in 1895, though hot dog carts are to be found throughout the city. Pittsburgh has one famous permanent location, The Original Hot Dog (or the ‘O’) near the university. Smaller cities such as Wichita, Kansas have no such restaurants except for recent imports in shopping centres, some bearing the sobriquet ‘Chicago’. They are, one need hardly say, nothing like the originals.[3]

A classic early hot dog stand, Matty’s in Chicago, was a simple box design with a service window and vernacular art – now lost to gentrification.

Originally hot dog stands did not need brand names in order to sell products, but from the 1930s onwards brands began to mean something to customers – in two ways. Firstly, the brand of hot dog sold. In the 1930s the newly formed Sabrett company gave away umbrellas with company logos to street vendors. They are still a picturesque fixture on today’s New York hot dog carts. The second type of branding that came into effect was that of the stand itself. The most famous of the stands to become branded was Nathan’s on Coney Island. Today, Nathan’s is a chain of fast-food outlets, as well as a national brand sold in supermarkets across the USA. That process began in 1995 when Nathan’s began selling to the New York ex-patriot market along Florida’s east coast. The name, fondly associated with Coney Island, was remembered by older New Yorkers who had eaten at the original stand. On any given day in the late 1930s to the 1950s half a million people would stroll along the boardwalk and Nathan’s might have sold 50,000 hot dogs per day. By 2005, Nathan’s had expanded into the national market, partly thanks to its name, partly due to its corporate affiliations, and partly because its product is all-beef and so is thought to be better quality than ordinary supermarket dogs.[4]

A full-bodied Maxwell Street Polish version of the hot dog is the true meaning of filling food.

The most famous hot dog stand in America, Nathan’s on Coney Island, dates from 1916 and descends from street carts.

Retailers and Brands

Everything and everyone needs to be branded in the twenty-first century. From products and the corporations that sell them, to educational institutions, political structures, and even individuals (such as popular entertainment or political figures), everyone needs to be identified with or as something different from all others. For food it might be that the product promotes health or just tastes better than anything else like it, or it could acquire unseen, mythical attributes, such as bonding with friends by drinking a mediocre famous label beer in a drinking establishment, or drenching oneself in some sickening perfume promoted by a celebrity. Like all things under the sun, not much is new and if it seems to be new it is probably only rediscovered. So, marketers have been working these twin themes since the latter part of the nineteenth century.

For hot dogs, the model is Oscar Mayer. As a fourteen-year-old, the Bavarian Oscar F. Mayer emigrated to the United States in 1873 and found work as a butcher boy in a Detroit meat market. A few years later, he moved west to Chicago where he worked in the meat industry, including six years at Armour and Co.’s stockyards as a buyer. In 1883 Oscar F. asked his brother Gottfried, by now a würstmeister in Nuremberg, to join him in Chicago where they opened a butcher’s shop. The Oscar Mayer company dates its founding to that event. Located in the heavily German near North Side, the Mayers were a success with several lines of meat products, notably bacon, wieners and Thuringers. Now a true American entrepreneur, Oscar F. kept an eye on marketing opportunities. He sponsored booths and sold products on the Midway at the great Columbian Exposition of 1893, making sure that the company name was seen by the multitudes who attended and dined. By the turn of the century Oscar Mayer had delivery wagons across Chicago selling the new brand, ‘Edelweiss’. The name, from an Alpine flower, evoked a feeling of purity and a particular kind of German sentimentality, showing a Mayer predilection for just the right symbol as a sales tool and for new technology. Branding meats was, in 1904, an innovation: Oscar Mayer meant quality. In 1906 the company agreed to join in the new federal meat inspection programme (partly brought on by Upton Sinclair’s revelations about horrendous conditions in the Chicago stockyards and meat packing plants in his classic novel, The Jungle).

Hot dog service in a modern stand, Byron’s, Forest Park, Illinois.

From its original meat store roots the company grew. The founder’s son, Oscar G. Mayer, was sent to Harvard where he earned Phi Beta Kappa honours and, returning to Chicago, became not only an outstanding businessman but a long-time supporter of education. In 1911 the company was formally incorporated. Soon afterwards, it began using cars for deliveries and pioneered the use of paper boxes for packing. By 1918, flush with money made supplying the military during the First World War, a new name appeared on products – ‘Oscar Mayer Approved Meat Products’. No longer would an older, more German symbol do, and a strong personal presence was thought to be better for marketing. Business was so good that expansion and more control over ingredients became necessary. In the spring of 1919 Oscar G. travelled north to Madison, Wisconsin, to visit one of his sisters who had gone to the University of Wisconsin and married there. He happened upon an auction of a big packing plant built as a cooperative three years earlier that had since gone out of business. Though interested in the plant, he had planned to visit a brother-in-law in nearby Mt Horeb that day. His Stutz Bearcat could not negotiate the muddy country roads, so he attended the auction instead. The price was right but he had to ask the auctioneer to delay the sale until he could return to Chicago and consult with his father and their banker about so large a step. The plant became the company’s main animal slaughter and later processing centre, employing 2–3,000 workers. Today it is the company headquarters, the full business operation having shifted there from Chicago in the 1950s.[5]

Innovations in packaging and marketing built the company. The first patent for machinery to package sliced bacon was granted to the company in 1924. Other products such as cheese could already be bought pre-packaged in the new self-service markets (begun in 1916), but it wasn’t until Oscar Mayer’s invention that bacon could be bought in a similar way. The package design remains the same and it made the company a major brand. In 1929 the Mayers hit upon the idea of branding each sausage they made with a yellow paper band bearing its name in red. At first, only one in four were so banded because they were done by hand, but in 1944 machinery was patented to automate the process. The ‘Yellow Band’ label was a brilliant way to single out Oscar Mayer wieners as top quality because they seemed to be handmade with special care. To some extent they were, in the days before full automation, but not as they had been in 1883. Red and yellow became the iconic colours for hot dogs, for other companies and hot dog sellers alike. And for the next thirty years, the slogan ‘Look for the brand with the yellow band’ was a well-remembered advertising line. In the 1950s Oscar Mayer introduced the ‘wiener tunnel’, and with it new packaging based on the Dow Chemical Company’s Saran Wrap. Said one Oscar man, ‘We did things with it that even Dow couldn’t imagine.’ Modern hot dog packs, branded and sold by the millions, are really the work of the engineering masters whom the Mayers hired and nurtured.[6]

In the age of self-service supermarkets, packaging is one way to sell merchandise, as the huge literature on design tells us. Advertising is another. The Oscar Mayer company had been using newspaper advertising since 1915. The emphasis was on quality of product and health: concerns about cholesterol and fat had yet to materialize. The Mayers knew that personal branding was an excellent sales tool. In 1936 Carl Mayer thought up another icon of food marketing, the ‘Wienermobile’. The idea came from the company’s wiener wagon that travelled around Chicago with a German band serenading sausage lovers.[7] The period was fertile for theme-based restaurants and this would be the ultimate mobile food place. Shaped like a sausage with the Oscar Mayer yellow band around it, the wood-framed vehicle conveyed a new personalized company symbol. If the invented Aunt Jemima could be portrayed at the Columbian Exposition and Betty Crocker on the radio by real people, then the real Oscar Mayers could be personified by a tiny chef named Little Oscar. He was a cheerful fellow, dressed in cooking whites, who would hop out of the Wienermobile and distribute ‘wiener whistles’ (after 1952) that were modelled on the mobile itself. When thanked for the whistle, the ‘chef’ might answer, ‘Frank you very much’.

The best-known hot dog advertising symbol in America, Oscar Mayer’s Wienermobile.

Little Oscar was played by a series of little people, beginning with Meinhardt Raabe, who later played the Coroner in The Wizard of Oz. Raabe had worked at fairs around the country after visiting the Midget Village at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Little Oscar went on to be played by George Molchan for thirty-six years. The reasons for developing such a character are related to popular culture and marketing. Dwarves are themes in Germanic folklore where they are artificers – making magic rings and, maybe, sausages. This is the theme of a panoramic painting decorating the walls of Usinger’s, another famous German sausage maker in Milwaukee. Little people frequently featured in public entertainments and Little Oscar became a well accepted kind of attraction. Perhaps most importantly, the whole package was directed towards children. A funny-looking vehicle, a tiny chef giving away small samples and small toys was meant to delight children and their parents. Perhaps as early as the 1930s the astute Mayer family understood that if a marketer captured children they would not only win sales from the parents, but gain customers for life. The hot dog, born as a joke and associated with public entertainment, would become further infantilized by these brilliant marketers.

Basically a regional company until the after the Second World War, Oscar Mayer began to expand to national markets. The company bought packing plants in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and by the 1960s was not only a national, but an international company. Advertising went with the expansion, not only in print media but on regional and national television. Oscar Mayer is identified in American folklore with a jingle composed in 1963 by advertising man Richard Trentlage (see p. 57).[8] An instant success, this ode to cannibalism has been sung by children’s voices on television and radio ever since and nothing else has ever sold hot dogs like it. However, since much of the company’s sales are in bologna (the ingredients and texture not too dissimilar to its hot dogs), another jingle appeared in 1976: ‘My bologna has a first name, it’s Oscar. My bologna has a second name, it’s Mayer . . .’ Although not as compelling as the original wiener song, it is also widely known. Beginning in 2006, an American Idol-style national contest for both jingles in English and one in Spanish have been held, a major prize being tickets to the popular television talent show. Though Oscar Mayer has not been in the hands of the original family since 1981 – it is now part of a huge international company, Kraft-General Foods – the marketing designs begun early in the twentieth century continue.

Post-Second World War America became more child-centred than ever as babies boomed and suburbs bloomed. If the Oscar Mayer company directed its marketing at children, so did many others, as the estimated US$8 billion spent on marketing food to children shows.[9] Children having fun became a theme that continues to the present: Walt Disney built the first Disneyland in 1955 at the same time that the company’s popular Mickey Mouse Club appeared on television. Hot dog advertising latched onto the trend. The Oscar Mayer jingle found competition from rival company Armour with a well-remembered tune that accompanied television cartoons:

Hot dogs, Armour Hot Dogs

What kinds of kids eat Armour Hot Dogs?

Big kids, little kids, kids who climb on rocks

fat kids, skinny kids, even kids with chicken pox

love hot dogs, Armour Hot Dogs

The dogs kids love to bite!

Ballpark Brand offered the jaunty ‘How can you tell the difference between a girl hot dog and a boy hot dog?’ They followed with print advertising showing children in outdoor settings with balloons and hot dogs. Bryan Brothers, a large regional company headquartered in West Point, Mississippi, put a freckled boy on its Prairie Belt Brand canned sausages in the 1950s and held a public talent contest for its company song, ‘It’s a P. B. for me’. (Contestants were asked to send in a ‘wax record or wire tape’.)[10] Wilson’s hot dog advertisements featured the Muppets, one of them being turned into a hot dog (and presumably eaten like an Oscar Mayer wiener). An Ekrich commercial of 1974 had children expressing love for their mother for serving them hot dogs, and the list goes on. Children and dogs, even hot dogs, have always gone together in popular culture.

Branding is an important selling tool, even in an era of consolidation. Most of the major hot dog brands are owned by larger conglomerates. To name but a few: Ball Park, Best Kosher, Bryan and Cincinnati’s famous Kahn’s are Sara Lee marks; Kraft Foods holds Oscar Mayer; Fischer and Field (both from Kentucky), Scott Peterson and Nathan’s are Specialty Foods Group brands; and John Morrell owns both national and regional brands, Dinner Bell, Hunter, Kretschmar, Peyton’s, Rath Black Hawk, Rodeo, Shenson and Tobin’s First Prize. Some of these have always been competitors both nationally and regionally, each maker trying to gain an edge over their rivals, by appealing to quality, health and price.

If the hot dogs are not enough, many stands offer plenty more, as in this Dog Haus.

In the latter years of the twentieth century, the consuming public was told by nutritional experts that most dietary fats were health hazards. It is widely assumed that fear of fat drove down hot dog sales in the United States, and sales remained ‘flat’ during this period. This trend expanded a previously small niche in the marketplace for premium, ‘adult’ hot dogs. Brands such as the independent Vienna Beef Company of Chicago, Best Kosher, Nathan’s and Hebrew National, all-beef products, have spread across the country. Vienna, for instance, is sold by the huge national retailer Target, while Best Kosher and Sinai 48 are offered by Costco, the warehouse chain, both as retail and foodservice items.

The Vienna Beef Company began in 1893 in the Maxwell Street Market area, and still makes a speciality Maxwell Street Polish sausage.

Marketing people have always known that they cannot go wrong by selling health to the public. From the creation of healthy breakfast cereals by the Kellogg and Post companies down to low-fat hot dogs, the theme is much the same: stave off disease by eating wholesome foods. For the sausage industry that means poultry. While there are vegetarian franks of various sorts, most Americans think of chicken and turkey as low-fat, healthier meat. So large has the industry grown that the National Pork Council devised a sales campaign touting ‘the other white meat’. Once one manufacturer lowered the fat content of their products by adding poultry, so did the rest. Many of today’s supermarket hot dogs contain cheap chicken as well as pork. The mild flavours and soft textures do not differ much from the all-pork originals.

In America, price conquers all. There is a hot dog hierarchy in supermarket cold meats cases, all based on price. High-end products, often called frankfurters, might sell for upwards of $3.50–$4 for a 12-ounce package, but at the low end the cheapest poultry and pork (and sometimes other animal parts) hot dogs can cost $1 when on sale. The largest sellers are at the middle to low end because hot dogs are now commodities, not artisan-made products. The largest consumers are those at the lowest tier of American incomes, and hot dogs also appear on school lunch menus where economy is important to school authorities. In this, the cheapest hot dogs replicate the early hot dog stands that fed the urban poor in earlier days.

4

Hot Dog Culture

Calvin Coolidge, an American president, once said that ‘the business of America is business’. Hot dogs are certainly business from big meat companies down to the humble stand owner. But the hot dog is more than a sausage sold to the public. It represents ideas that Americans hold dear and says a great deal about society and culture. This comes from the hot dog’s special character: it may be the most flexible American food. Not only does it stem from the country’s ethnic roots, therefore varying in its intrinsic flavour and texture, but what goes on it differs dramatically from place to place. In short, the hot dog in its bun is a platform for culture.

Ethnicity

The United States is a land of immigrants, including Native Americans, albeit dating from some millennia earlier than the creators of hot dogs. As already seen, Germans emigrated to America in great numbers throughout the nineteenth century, taking with them true sausage food culture. They sold frankfurters, wieners and other sausages from wagons and carts on city streets and at public events. Anton Feuchtwanger at the St Louis World’s Fair is but one example. And like Oscar Mayer, the most prestigious sausage-makers have always been German-trained. By the turn of the twentieth century, ethnicity had changed the world of hot dogs.

Invented by immigrants to America, hot dogs took on newer ethnic characteristics and styles, as in Hast-E Dog in a Polish community.

Donna Gabaccia has argued that foods of ethnic groups broke out of their community boundaries and entered the general stream of American culture.[1] One could call this the ‘Chop Suey Effect’, that creation being a thoroughly Americanized version of a common toishan (south Chinese) dish. German sausages may have been the first such food, before spaghetti and meatballs, chow mein and chop suey emerged as popular American foods. Usually the process began in cities where specific immigrant dishes were served in restaurants, at food stands and retail outlets. Partly because of where they were located, two things happened to cause these foods to become generalized ‘American’: one is that other ethnic groups adapted them; the other is the ongoing trajectory of modern food, industrialization and commercialization. Consider that Chun-King, an early mass market ‘Chinese’ food company, was founded in 1947 by Jeno Paulucci, born in Duluth, Minnesota to impoverished Italian immigrants. But hot dogs came first.

Jews contributed much to American culture and were the main force behind the all-beef hot dog. Between 1880 and 1924 2.5 million Jews emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States, adding to the 300,000 – mainly German – Jews already there. The overwhelming majority of them settled in American cities – 1.5 million in New York, 270,000 in Chicago. Mostly from shtetlach, small rural communities, they were poor and occupied the lowest economic niches as peddlers, garment workers and small shop owners. Naturally, some were in the food business, making and selling to their landsmen. While many Jews were not observant, a good number respected ancient food prohibitions by refusing to eat pork or mix dairy products with meat. An example is Chicago’s Vienna Beef Company that began in the Maxwell Street market area, the Jewish quarter at the time, in the 1890s. The original owners sold sausages at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and it came into the hands of the Jewish Ladanyi and Reichl families (it may have been won in a card game by Lee Ladanyi, an impresario who supposedly brought the famous hootchy-kootchy dancer, Little Egypt to the fair).[2] Theirs was one of a number of Jewish-owned hot dog producers, not all kosher, in the city, selling to street vendors and later hot dog stands alike. Hot dogs varied in composition but the reputation of Jewish manufacturers, much of it based on the idea that kosher was ‘purer’ than other kinds of food (though most all-beef hot dogs were not actually kosher), was such that the all-beef hot dog became the standard in Chicago by the 1950s. The same holds for New York with its very large Jewish population.

If Jews made hot dogs, Greeks, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Italians and Mexicans dressed them. In Chicago of 1900 to the 1920s, Greeks and Italians competed in the fruit and vegetable market and a good number of each were street vendors. By the late 1920s the almost 30,000 Greeks in the city owned more than 10,000 businesses.[3] Both developed many of the toppings on the classic Chicago hot dog, the classic ‘garden on a bun’. Green relish (piccalilli), sport peppers (pickled mildly hot small chillies) and tomato are Mediterranean in origin, like a giardiniere. Mustard is German-Jewish, as are the pickle spears and optional celery salt (this replaces a once ubiquitous vegetable on the American table). The ensemble gives a sweet–sour–spicy flavour profile that was dear to East European and Mediterranean taste buds. The Chicago hot dog is a palimpsest of early twentieth-century Chicago ethnicity.

Other cities have similar stories. The ‘Coney’, or ‘Coney Island’, is a hot dog in a bun coated with a meat sauce, known by its south-western American name, chilli. Also called a ‘chilli dog’, this now national dish did not originate in the Mexican border regions, though it might have been eaten there without benefit of a specific name, but in the Detroit, Michigan area thanks to Greek and Balkan immigrants. There are arguments about who invented this kind of hot dog sauce: most point to immigrants who arrived in Detroit, Jackson or Flint, Michigan around 1914. George Todoroff in Jackson, Constantine ‘Gust’ Keros who arrived in 1910 and started American Coney Island in 1929 and his brother William, who opened the famous Lafayette Coney Island next door a few years later, are but a few names that have been mentioned. The sauces vary, but most are tomato-based with spices reminiscent of flavours from the Balkans. In similar fashion, Christ Economou started a stand in McKeesport, Pennsylvania with a ‘Greek’-style sauce in 1919, going on to open several more across the country and ending up in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1926 where his Coney Islander chain remains popular. Cincinnati’s chilli, for which the city’s diners seem to have a peculiar mania, was introduced by a Macedonian, Thomas Kiradjieff, in 1922. His Empress emporium served a thin, cinnamon-laced chilli in ‘5-Ways’: that is with different components including spaghetti. (Rival Skyline Chili, perhaps the best known outside Cincinnati, was founded in 1949 by a former Empress employee, Nicholas Lambrinides, and his sons.)[4] Cincinnati chilli is not called Coney Island because it is not specifically a hot dog item. Clearly, the new American Midwesterners either had been to Coney Island where they saw hot dog stands in action, or had heard of them. When setting up quick service restaurants, the glamour of that name lent hot dogs a special cachet. That these were all immigrants from impoverished parts of Europe who set up small food shops is another part of the social history of hot dogs.

Greek immigrants greatly influenced America’s food, as in this Las Vegas stand.

Entrepreneurs

As is commonly said in the industry, hot dogs is a pennies business. Pennies per pound add up to big money for producers, and for the sellers it can mean everything. Many of the hot dog purveyors were and are small-scale entrepreneurs at the bottom of the business ladder. Food has always been a way for the newly arrived or marginalized to enter the greater economy through serving their immediate communities. In his study of a Mayan community, anthropologist Sol Tax called this ‘penny capitalism’.[5] Based on rural ideas, such as family-based businesses, brought to urban environments, here was a way for the enterprising to make it in the industrialized world. Often these kinds of businesses are ‘off the books’, part of an underground and untaxed economy. For instance, in 1913 A. E. Munier, a former professor of languages at Lake Forest College in Illinois, was reported to have given up ‘pedagogy for a more remunerative pursuit behind the counter of a moving peanut stand’ from which he also dealt hot dogs on the campus of Northwestern University. He claimed to have made $200 a month profit, or $20 more than college teaching.[6] By selling small items such as food items, for profits reckoned in small sums, many a family rose from the depths of poverty.

Small entrepreneurs represent some of the most important myths underpinning American culture, among them the main reasons for the hot dog’s enduring popularity. Success in business endeavours has always been one of them. There are others, however, that may be less obvious. One of these is community values. In the same way that local shops, before the rise of ubiquitous chain retailers, used to tell us about the character of a neighbourhood, so do local food purveyors. Most are bound to their communities and locales with no thought of becoming titans of industry. In this way, they reify the values of the community around them, local or citywide. In city after city across America, people speak with fondness about their favourite hot doggeries. It might be the ‘O’ in Pittsburgh, the Varsity in Atlanta, Gray’s Papaya in New York, Original New York Systems in Providence, Rhode Island, Pink’s in Los Angeles, or a host of others. As they say, home is where the hot dog is.

Individualism and equality are two more main currents of American thought. In its ideal eighteenth-century liberal form ‘equality’ meant equality before the law, or perhaps equal access to opportunity. But in popular ideology it smacks of social levelling. Official organs of social control – schools, government, media – all carry forward versions of these themes and explicitly say that this is the meaning of ‘democracy’. Going to ball games, attending fairs or even on the picnic grounds, Americans of all social and economic stations meet and mingle. Most of all, sharing the same foods in these public places reinforces this ideal. The hot dog is one of the first foods to fill that role as a symbol of social unity. Hot dog stands attract people of all classes who stand together, elbow to elbow, some with jackets and ties, others in work dress, eating their city’s singular sausage. Pink’s in Los Angeles is a prime example, attracting film celebrities, tourists and the folks of the down-at-heel section of the city where it is located. The entrepreneurial attitudes of stand operators are expressions of these twin American ideals. In our ever more bureaucratic and socially stratified nation – both private and public – these are radical ideas.

American individualism is a highly prized idea, much referenced in advertising (as in the famous hamburger chain’s motto, ‘Have it your way at Burger King’). The hot dog was an industrial food transformed into something individual, or at least representing a local community.

Asian restaurateurs are famous for adapting to American tastes, here mixing Korean pibimbap and hot dogs.

Historically speaking, the hot dog is one of the first mass-produced, ‘portion-controlled’ foods in the United States. It was created to be served in public spaces, whether at festivals or simply to people walking in city streets. It is a machine-made food, and we think the better of it for being so. Since the beginning of the machine age, people of the Western world tend to see themselves and the world in terms of mechanical devices. Put into popular, commercial terms, this means that a product made by a machine is less subject to contamination than something made by hand. As in the hamburger chains the motto is surely ‘fast, clean, and cheap’, giving rise to sterile eating environments. The hot dog, the first fast food, defies this dictum in several ways. In their many varieties, flavours in the hot dogs themselves and what goes on them are both regional and individual. It is ancient protocol for hot dog sellers to ask their customers, ‘What do you want on it?’ Though there are general styles, such as ‘Chicago’, ‘New York’, ‘White Hots’ (in upper New York State) and others, what goes on it is up to individual preference. Hot dog fans know what they like. And most of them admit that the best stands and carts are the ‘grungiest’, because they seem to be older and thus more ‘authentic’. In fact, the hot dog eaten on the street, out of the hand, is a kind of protest against modernity, perhaps in similar ways to the penny capitalist nature of the hot dog sellers.

The land of abundance is an enduring American ideal or, as a famous historian put it, a People of Plenty.[7] Americans have more and want more . . . food, consumer goods, everything. It is not necessarily the quality of food that matters but the amount. Many a European visitor to the United States in the nineteenth century commented on these aspects of American food: coarse, meaty, and a lot of it. A visit to any fast-food stand in any city – whether it be selling cheese steaks in Philadelphia or Italian beef in Chicago – shows customers readily extolling the quantities of food served at good prices. Traditionally, this theme appears on hot dog emporia and logos, the Vienna Beef Company’s being perhaps the best known. From vernacular art on individually owned shops to fanciful carts – all show fully loaded sandwiches to entice their ravening customers.

The Corn Dog likely comes from the American South, but the most celebrated purveyor is Cozy Dog in Springfield, Illinois, which claims credit for this once regional and now national hot dog creation.

In the 1920s vernacular food art became architectural when the restaurant took the shape of the food itself, as in Los Angeles’s famed Tale O’ The Pup.

The single most famous hot dog sign belongs to Super Dawg in Chicago, where Morrie and Florrie hold court at their drive-in.

And in the world of the internet, websites and blogs, pictures of hot dogs depict the same – often in close-up with French fries. Although cutting across class lines, this is food of the lower economic and social orders where it’s value for money that counts – more for less, and mostly meat.

Visual art and folklore of the hot dog represent all these ideas. Stands and carts in the shape of hot dogs, handmade signs showing hot dogs on buns overflowing with ingredients, cartoons – mostly of dogs, dachshunds especially – ready to be eaten, jokes and songs about these sausages are signs of the ideas mentioned above. Within them flows American humour, dryly ironic, wry and at the same time whimsical and nostalgic. Here are expressions of culture made by the small entrepreneurs who appeal to their local customers – culture from the bottom up. And it was they, again appealing to local tastes, who created the notable regional hot dog styles.

Hot dog vendors are entrepreneurs whose colourful decor is meant to attract curious customers, like at Duck’s, Chicago.

Regional Variations

As the hot dog spread across the United States, carried by vendors of various origins and often based on local sausage-makers, the hot dog took on local variations, like a living organism that adapts to its environment. So strong is local hot dog culture in various areas that diners simply will not accept other types. An example is the several times that New York hot dog chains have attempted to open in Chicago: all were expensive failures. Some in the hot dog industry have posited a hot dog fault line running north and south through Florida. The east coast is largely populated by retirees from New York, while the west coast is heavily Midwestern. Each eats its own version of hot dogs.

Leo’s, New York City. When hot dog carts moved into permanent quarters, they often replicated their original design: service over a counter and stand-up dining.

Among the many hot dog types, some deserve special mention because they either represent special local culture or are nationally famous as symbols of hot dog strongholds.

In some places in New England one might find ‘chow chow dogs’ (steamed, with lettuce, bacon and shredded cheddar cheese), or in Rhode Island, ‘New York system’, founded by Greek immigrants in the late 1930s and featuring a spicy meat sauce. More typically, New Englanders eat their hot dog in a bun whose sides have been shaved of their crusts (sometimes toasted in the manner of Friendly’s, a fast service restaurant chain) and either cooked in hot water or grilled. Some are topped with mustard, ketchup, onion and relish (piccalilli). The most famous of the mustard and ketchup varieties are ‘Fenway franks’, sold at the home of Boston’s beloved Red Sox baseball club.

New York-style hot dogs are probably closest to the original form.[8] Served at places like Papaya King and Gray’s Papaya, these are smallish (ten to the pound) natural casing all-beef dogs, flat griddled just as they were in New York’s most famous stand, Nathan’s. Most of them are made by Sabrett, the company that introduced umbrellas to hot dog carts. Sabrett, founded in the 1930s, is now part of Marathon Enterprises in New Jersey, itself descended from a company founded by Greek immigrants in the 1920s.[9] New York hot dogs are usually eaten with mustard, perhaps sauerkraut, or onions cooked with a little tomato-based sauce. Lacking grilling equipment, hot dog carts use the ‘dirty water’ heating method, keeping their sausages in hot water tanks. Since the hot dogs are small and cheap – as little as a dollar – diners often order two or three and down them on the spot.

The ‘white hot’ is the signature hot dog around Rochester in upper New York State. This is a mildly flavoured German ‘weisswurst’ or bockwurst, a natural case sausage containing pork and veal that is grilled and served with onions, mustard and sometimes a meat sauce. Its relative, the ‘red hot’, also popular, contains some beef. Zweigle‘s in Rochester, a company founded in 1880 as a butcher shop by C. Whilehem Zweigle, claims to have introduced the white hot in 1925. Zweigle and rival Hoffman from Syracuse (this city’s preference is for long hot dogs) dominate the market in this region of New York State.[10] White hots share characteristics with hot dogs in Wisconsin, especially the Milwaukee area. Both stem from German immigrants who took sausage culture to the States and changed local eating habits. The diagnostic product is a thick white pork-based sausage that is grilled and served with onions and mustard. In Wisconsin it is a coarse-ground bratwurst (a raw sausage cooked on the spot) that is usually served with beer. Such are the ways that the food of older generations of immigrants spilled over their cultural boundaries.

The hot dogs of New Jersey, a state that has always had identity problems, are unique. Deep-fried hot dogs are popular, with one place, Rutt’s Hut in Clifton, serving them in three ways: barely fried, ripped-fried until the natural cased sausage bursts open, and the thoroughly blackened ‘cremator’. In and around this state, with its large Italian population, there are ‘Italian hot dogs’, deep fried and served on crusty rolls, with fried or stewed potatoes, and cooked onions and green pepper strips. The last of these, bell or hot peppers, either cooked or pickled, are characteristic of the southern Italian-Sicilian contribution to regional fast food.

Chicago hot dogs are the very model of ethnic mixture, from basic sausage to the toppings on the assembled hot dog. There is another, the ‘Maxwell Street Polish’. Chicago is the second largest Polish city in the world, so it would only be natural to find kielbasa on a bun, but it took a Macedonian to create it. In about 1939, a hot dog stand owner named Jim Stefanovich, at Jim’s Original on Maxwell Street, had a Polish sausage-maker create a coarse-grind sausage that approximated the sausages of his homeland. Large in diameter, griddled, put on a bun with mustard and caramelized onions – along with standard Chicago toppings – the Maxwell Street Polish is a Chicago staple in both its original and, of course, all-beef form. Tomato ketchup is anathema.[11]

Detroit, Flint and Jackson, Michigan, are strongholds of the Coney Island, or Coney. As outlined above, Greek and Balkan restaurateurs invented the thin meat sauce, dubbed ‘chilli. In Flint, the sausage market is synonymous with Koegel’s, founded by Albert Koegel, a German-trained ‘wurstmacher’ who first arrived in Flint in 1916. In once industrial Flint and Detroit, the heart of America’s decaying automobile industry, Coney stands are numerous, selling to the ethnic mix who worked and still live there, from East Europeans to African-Americans. The same kind of hot dog culture runs across the cities located along the southern rim of the Great Lakes. Whether Tony Packo’s in Toledo, with its Hungarian sausage dogs and famous sauces, to the rust belt cities of northern Indiana, where Coneys hold sway, and into Chicago. Expatriates from all these areas often remark that what they remember best and yearn for most are the local foods, especially the local fast food hot dogs and their relatives. For that reason, almost all the iconic hot dog purveyors do considerable mail order business.

The foods of the American south are famously varied from region to region, and hot dogs share some of this characteristic. A style has developed in the numerous outlets in Huntington and Charleston, West Virginia (with joking references to hillbillies) that calls for a red ‘weenie’ placed in a soft steamed bun layered with meat sauce – spicy or mild and often made by the stand owner – then covered in mustard, chopped onions and coleslaw.[12] The West Virginia style has seeped into the Carolinas but in the eastern regions diners are partial to a vinegar spicy hot sauce called ‘Texas Pete Hot Sauce’, (the company dates to the 1930s). The flavour profile matches the regional barbecue style, not sweet sauce, but vinegary and spicy hot. Further south, Atlanta is home to the Varsity, one of the country’s most celebrated stands. Its stylistic origins lie in the early twentieth century, when numerous Greek street vendors, led by ‘Old John Salas’, sold ‘weenies’, spread with ‘mustard, chile and the sauerkraut’.[13] In central Georgia the locals claim the ‘scrambled hot dog’ as their own. These, like many in the south, are dyed red, as if taking literally the term ‘red hot’. The scrambled version came from Columbus or Macon, and is composed with mustard, ketchup, onions, a meat sauce with chilli and oyster crackers on top. Some, depending on the town, have cheese and pickles. These are cheap eats made for rural and small town southern folk, but extended with a staple of lunch counter food, oyster crackers.

Along the gulf coast, Mobile, Alabama, is home to numerous hot dog carts during the city’s splendid Mardi Gras festival, but the paradigmatic style comes from the Dew Drop Inn where one can get an ‘upside down’ in which the vivid red dog is set on a bed of sauerkraut and chilli, along with mustard and ketchup. The best known coastal dogs are found in another city famed for its Lenten festival, New Orleans. In 1948 Stephen and Erasmus Loyacano began selling Lucky Dogs from unique hot dog-shaped carts in the city. The product is itself undistinguished but the cart style fits into New Orleans’s colourful Creole market and festival tradition. Lucky Dogs were made even more famous when Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole’s great picaresque novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, operates a cart with comic consequences.

New Orleans is famous for its colourful social life, including its Lucky Dog carts.

Hot dogs are also highly regional in the ways that they are made and in toppings. This is an early hot dog stand on the US–Mexican border, serving both communities.

In the south-west, one might imagine that Mexican culinary practices would have affected hot dog sellers but it wasn’t until the 1960s that a Sonora hot dog appeared in Tucson, Arizona. As Mexican, or more properly northern Mexican–American foods have become important parts of the American food scene, so Sonoran hot dogs have spread through Arizona. The dish is an ordinary hot dog, wrapped in bacon before cooking (or with cooked chopped bacon to meet local food safety standards), with pinto beans, a salsa, onions, tomato, condiments such as mayonnaise and mustard and sometimes shredded cheese. The bun is a Mexican-style bolillo, with a crusty, baguette-like exterior.

California is highly varied in its hot doggery yet there is no single distinct hot dog style. Los Angeles has the second highest hot dog consumption rate in the United States (New York is first) but the lack of an iconic hot dog perhaps mirrors the city’s notorious lack of a single urban centre. Pink’s, one of the country’s most famous stands, is in Los Angeles. Founded in 1939 as a mobile cart, Pink’s serves a hot dog with mustard and a ‘thick’ chilli on top. That it originally served a mainly Hispanic clientele shows the state of Mexican food in California at the time. Wienerschnitzel, founded in 1961, on the other hand, is as close to a national hot dog chain as there is in the United States with 340 restaurants in ten states. The chain claims to sell 120 million hot dogs annually and its considerable marketing features dachshunds. Its hot dogs come in several versions, the basic one with mustard, others with chilli, onions, tomatoes, relish or sauerkraut, and another with pastrami loaded onto it. Perhaps the closest restaurant group in California to the eastern hot dog havens is Casper’s in the San Francisco Bay Area. Begun in Oakland in 1934 by an Armenian family, the company has been making its sausages to its own specifications under the name SPAR since 1985. Its original sandwich, still served, is a steamed natural casing hot dog that is available with cheddar cheese, sauerkraut, pickles or jalapeños and a chilli dog.[14] None of these west-coast places quite captures the devotion to hot dog culture of America’s older cities.

Other hot dog regions exist and some specialties transcend locality. For instance, the Kansas City hot dog has sauerkraut and melted cheese, in the manner of the Reuben sandwich that was probably invented in the 1920s in Omaha, Nebraska. At the other end of the scale, the corn dog is now widely eaten and sold ready-made in most supermarkets. It is basically a corn dodger, native to the south and Midwest, that is, a hot dog (the cheaper the better) skewered on a stick, dipped in corn batter and deep fried. The origins are in dispute, some claiming Texas, others the Cozy Corner in Springfield, Illinois – in about 1947 at the state fair. Corn dogs appeared at fairs early in the twentieth century and corn dipping machines were widely available in the 1920s, thus making the Texas argument stronger. Corn dog popularity is such that the Hot Dog On A Stick restaurant chain, begun on a southern California beach in 1946, now has outlets in seventeen states and franchise agreements in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Venezuela. Like so many other foods, the corn- or batter-dipped dog is another that has crossed its community boundaries to become a standard American food.

5

Hot Dogs Around the World

In his 1880 book about his travels in Europe, A Tramp Abroad, the great American writer Mark Twain regarded the foods he found there with disgust when compared to the glories of his homeland. Twain’s description of what a beef steak should be – ‘A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick’, barely griddled with pepper and butter, and surrounded by ‘tender, yellowish fat’ – would horrify the vegetarian.[1] If he were to travel the world today, the great satirist would see American food everywhere, but he would be unlikely to rejoice because it is industrialized fare, without the flavour and texture that he thought characterized the American fare of his day.

Like other American fast foods, hot dogs have spread around the globe. None of these international versions – not even in German-speaking countries – share the same history or cultural attachments of the American hot dog. What many borrowed is the idea of centrally processed quick foods, sold by street vendors or franchised operations, and a semblance of the whimsical humour of the name and some the iconography. The name hot dog speaks of American presence and cultural influence around the world, beginning in the First World War era.

Though the name is universal, it does have vernacular translations. Some include:

Spanish (Mexico, Spain, and much of

Latin America): perrito or perro Caliente

Guatemalan: shucos

French-Canadian: chien chaud

German: Heisser Hund or Wurst

Portuguese (Brazil): cachorro quente

Swedish: korv or varmkorv

Norwegian and Danish: polser or grillpolser

Czech: park v rohliku

Dutch: worstjes or broodje met warm worstje

Finnish: makkarat

Russian: sosiska

Mandarin Chinese: rouchang

Italian: hot dog

Filipino: hotdog[2]

In some countries, styles are plain, in others local food traditions transform the original into unique products. Though most Canadians deny it, their country’s English-speaking culture is so close to that of the United States that hot dogs in both nations share many similarities. In Canada’s urban centres, several kinds of hot dog have become traditions in their own right. Anyone who grew up in Toronto is likely to have eaten at Shopsy’s, a hot dog company begun by Harry and Jenny Shopsowitz in 1922 to feed garment workers. The company is now part of Maple Leaf brands which also sells Hygrade’s in Quebec and Burns in the west. Shopsy carts allow customers to garnish their own grilled hot dogs with ketchup, mustard, relish, pickles, maybe bacon and sauerkraut. At athletic venues, such as Toronto’s Air Canada Centre where 9-inch hot dogs are famous, fairs, parks and other public places across the country, hot dogs hawked from stands and carts are standard features of the landscape.

A classic Czech-American hot dog roll.

Montreal with its French culinary and street food traditions differs somewhat from its Anglophone neighbours. The province of Quebec has two main kinds of chien chaud: rotis – or toasté – and the more characteristic steamé. The latter is a steamed dog with a nicely mushy bun, and, when ‘all-dressed’, includes mustard, coleslaw, sweet relish and chopped onions. The ‘Michigans’ of Montreal are not like those of nearby New York State – chilli dogs – but instead usually have an Italian-style herb-flavoured tomato sauce covering. One might suppose that the accompanying frites would be crisp and flavoursome, but the Montreal style is generally limp and overcooked, quite unlike those of the European mother country.

Latin America has glorious street food traditions based on indigenous practices mixed with ones brought from migrants from the Old World. Hot dogs are not one of the featured fast or street foods of the region, but they are part of a complex mix of food and culture and take on local characteristics.

Just as Mexican street food moved north, so hot dogs (and food chains such as Denny’s) moved south and diversified according to region. It is hard to date the first appearance of perros calientes, but the turn of the twentieth century seems likely – at the same time that the Tex-Mex taco became popular. The Arizona Sonoran style is really a cross-cultural, cross-border creation because bacon and melted cheese (used in many Mexican street foods), along with salsas and onions, have piled onto the hot dog. Mexico City, for instance, is famed for its ‘heart attack’ hot dog – a bacon-wrapped creation now banned by health authorities in California. These delights might also use guacamole, as do other regional styles. In small towns across Mexico, street vendors sell hot dogs, almost always of the limp, cheap, supermarket variety, that are grilled and topped with the local version of red or green spicy salsa. Such hot dogs are rarely seen north of the border.

Like the rest of Central and South America, Guatemalans eat varieties of empanadas, a kind of pasty, and the hot dog could be regarded as a type of these. Stands there are famed for their shucos: dirty water dogs covered in a potentially huge array of ingredients, including mustard and mayonnaise, cooked cabbage, onions, other chopped sausage and even more meat. Similarly, Venezuela’s and Colombia’s street foods have long featured delectable empanadas of many varieties and now include hot dogs in their repertoires. They are filled with fairly tasteless pork-based dogs, then loaded with cooked chopped potatoes or crumbled potato chips (crisps), onions, mustard and various spicy sauces. In Colombia, a quail’s egg and sometimes pineapple chunks top the ensemble along with ‘salsa rosado’, a pink tomato-based sauce made with cream, cumin, lemon and hot chilli powder, among other ingredients. Squirting sauces are a common sight among hot dog diners, just as with a chilli or Chicago-style topped creation in America.

The theme of more is better defines the Brazilian hot dog, or cachorro quente. These are dishes straight out of Carnevale: two hot dogs in a bun, laden with everything from salad, mustard, ketchup, mayonnaise, peas, corn, potatoes – fried, mashed, or chips (crisps), olives, cheese and just about anything a vendor can imagine. Not all Brazilians eat such a monstrous hot dog, but the fact that it is available speaks of Brazil’s heterogeneous food and festival traditions.

The hot dog has also made its way down the west coast of South America. Salchipapas are common in Peru and Ecuador. Pork hot dogs are sliced, deep fried, put on a bun, topped with various salsas and, in some versions, a fried egg. The papas are French-fried potatoes that are wrapped up with the sandwich. These are the ultimate street food – fast, cheap and greasy.

Europeans have the longest history of sausages eaten out of hand, but even here, American hot dog traditions have taken hold. Historically, British food traditions are the underpinnings of American cuisine, but such delights as ‘bangers and mash’ have never taken hold on the west side of the Atlantic. Hot dogs, however, are now part of British street fare. One account holds that hot dogs were introduced to Britain in 1926 and were sold the next year at football stadia, covered in ‘glass paper’ and fortified with red pepper flakes.[3] However, they did not take hold in British haute cuisine, as evidenced by the famous story of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt serving the royal family hot dogs during their visit to the White House in 1939.[4] On a four-day visit to the USA, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were treated to hot dogs on a picnic. The king was reported to have eaten them enthusiastically, while the queen used a knife and fork. Hot dogs in a vaguely American style are sold from catering wagons and on city streets in Britain.

In keeping with hot dog tradition, this hot dog cart in London is owned by Hassan, a Turkish Cypriot.

Herta, a Nestlé company, makes popular skinless frankfurters of several types for the British market, many in consumer packs, and much for the food service industry. Among the company recipe suggestions are ‘the Yankee’, which calls for iceberg lettuce to line the bun and a cheese-slice wrapped hot dog set on top that is coated with ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise, and is eaten with chopped onions. Other suggestions of similar ilk are nothing like American breeds, but closer to Continental hot dogs, perhaps the diagnostic feature being mayonnaise.

Though a marketing tool for tourists to London, the ‘Australian’ hot dog, once served from a cart in Trafalgar Square and in other venues around the country, does have similarities to those served in that distant former British colony. Australia long retained the fare of the mother country, its quick food characterized by meat pies and the famous ‘pie floater’. Now disappearing from food carts, such as those on the Sydney waterfront, meat pies are often comprised of gristly meat and overcooked vegetables – usually peas – in gravy encased in a hard-to-digest pastry. Pie floaters are chopped meat pastries placed in a bowl of pea soup and topped with a tomato-based sauce. Competing with pies, hot dogs have become common, from roller-grilled sausages in petrol stations to street carts and wagons in most cities. Beginning in the mid-1990s Love Dogs and Shot Dogs vans appeared in Melbourne and in Perth; one vendor reckoned his sales at 1,000 per week. Many of the hot dogs are of the British ‘Australian’ kind: large, flaccid, skinless, pork and chicken based, while others, such as The American Hot Dog company in Brisbane, are fully American in character.

Hot dogs really began in German-speaking lands. Austria is the home of the wiener.

An ideal German bratwurst, complemented by sauerkraut on a crusty roll.

That Germany even uses the term ‘hot dogs’ is a reflection of the American military presence in the country since the end of the Second World War. Germans have been eating quick food sausages with bread or buns and mustard for centuries. Thuringers, wieners and frankfurters are the popular varieties, most commonly grilled. The most popular fast food outlets, sometimes called Würstchenbude (‘sausage stalls’) or Imbiss (‘snacks’), serve several kinds of sausage, ranging from bratwurst, to bockwurst. A slice of bread, mustard and a form of ketchup and usually French fries go with them. One speciality introduced in 1949 is ‘currywurst’ – cut-up pork sausages slathered with a curry-infused tomato sauce. Served with a roll, often with French fries, these greasy concoctions can be found across the country with several regional variations. It is cheap food, commonly eaten by working people, but in recent years has declined in popularity in favour of another working-class food – the doner kebab.

Next door to Germany, the Netherlands also has a long sausage tradition and, true to its place as the world’s crossroads, there are hot dogs. There are food vans and carts in almost every public venue, such as the Amsterdam main train station where dirty water dogs are served in steamed buns with mayonnaise, mustard, ketchup, onions and hot peppers. The American-style hot dog, however, has never replaced the frikandel in Dutch hearts. Cylindrical in shape, this is a mixture of chopped pork, beef, chicken and horsemeat that is deep fried and usually served with mayonnaise, mustard and onions. The frikandel is analogous to meatballs in Germany and Scandinavia and, like them, is not served in a bun. However, Dutch folklore holds its ingredients in the same suspicion that Americans once held hot dogs. The same applies to a unique Dutch fast service chain called Febo Kroket. These are automats (invented in about 1896) in which food is placed in boxes behind glass doors and purchased by putting coins in a slot. ‘Kroket’ means ‘croquette’, something battered or breaded and deep fried. In addition to the original meat and sauce-filled krokets, Febo serves Indonesian-inspired rice dishes, satays and hot dogs, along with vlaamse frites (Belgian fries). Late nights in Amsterdam would not be the same without these celebrated food outlets.

Scandinavia, to the north, also has a hot dog tradition. The Danish Tulip Food Company is a large producer of pork-based hot dogs, most under its Steff Houlberg brand with sales in other parts of Europe. Its signature product is a long sausage, whose ends extend beyond the bun, and toppings of mustard, ketchup and mayonnaise-based remoulade sauce. Hot dog carts and stands selling longish hot dogs are common in Scandinavia, weather permitting, especially in Sweden where the sausage might be wrapped in a thin, pitta-type bread. Swedes are also keen on mashed potatoes with their franks, often eschewing bread or bun for sausage and potatoes taken neat or with shrimp salad. Not to be outdone, Iceland has a unique hot dog, called pylsa, made from ground lamb and pork. What is thought to be Europe’s best hot dog stand, Bæjarins Betzu, was founded in 1937 in Reykjavik. Condiments include mustard, ketchup, fried and raw onions and remoulade. Other stands serve bacon-wrapped dogs with potato salad.

Icelanders know sausages and have what might be the most famous hot dog stand in Europe.

France does hot dogs as only a country that appreciates good bread can do. A baguette is hollowed out, condiments are poured in, followed by a hot dog long enough to protrude from the end of the baguette. More common in many a boulangerie is a baguette, split open, filled with cheese, usually Gruyère, and béchamel, then the sausage and all heated together. Linked with France since the early modern period by culinary historians, Italy also has something of a hot dog culture. Cafés, small food shops across the country and some street vendors in cities such as Rome, sell ‘hot dogs’, along with menu items including pizza slices and sandwiches. This being Italy, where bread is prized, hot dogs are served as panini, that is, on a ciabatta with mustard and perhaps salad. Spain, too, has long been culinarily connected to its eastern and northern neighbours. Here the American hot dog is analogous to salchichas, mildly flavoured native pork sausages. After the Second World War, Oscar Mayer operated in Spain in both the food service and retail markets. Packages of their products are readily available in food markets and in hotel and cafeteria buffet operations, but the hot dog as a restaurant item has not had a real presence in Spain despite the many tourists who might readily devour them. Spanish cuisine is resolutely Spanish. This hasn’t hindered a Spanish company, Hotfoodmatic, from developing a hot-baguette dispensing machine complete with hot dog.

Eastern Europe is also home to sausage cultures. Hot dogs can be found from the Czech Republic to Russia. In Prague’s Wenceslas Square hot dog stands abound, some calling themselves ‘Hot Dog Americi’. The Czech párek or párek v rohlíku (‘sausage in a roll’) is part of historic sausage traditions that the Czech Republic shares with its German-speaking neighbours. When served in sit-down restaurants, grilled or fried pork-based sausages appear in pairs, usually with bread, potatoes and cooked or raw cabbage. As street food, they come French-style, a crusty hollowed-out roll into which two thin sausages are inserted with mustard and/or ketchup squirted in. Many kiosks also serve hranolky, or French fries. Similar products appear not only across the Czech Republic but in Slovakia, only there they compete with the richman – cooked vegetables smashed together with mayonnaise, served on a bun.

The name ‘hot dog’ flourishes even in Poland, the home of the kielbasa.

Poland is synonymous with sausages, and even in the land of the kielbasa hot dogs have set down roots. As in other places these have been added to the fast food mix, now joining hamburgers in replacing traditional milk bars where pierogi (dumplings) held sway. Lantmannen Unibake Poland is a large international baking company that produces a wide variety of hot dog buns, including French rolls for the expanding Polish (and East European) market. In a wry comment on the quality of Polish hot dogs, American humorist P. J. O‘Rourke remarked: ‘I had 100,000 zlotys in my pocket, more than some Poles make in six months. I finally bought a hot dog. I suppose it was no worse than an American hot dog. Horrible things go into hot dogs. But in this hot dog you could taste them all.’[5]

Ever since Nathan’s of Coney Island fame opened a hot dog stand in Moscow’s Red Square in 1989, at the dawn of the glasnost era, hot dogs have become increasingly popular in Russia. Here, too, along with hamburgers, hot dogs compete with and have replaced traditional Russian pirozhki, meat- or vegetable-stuffed dumplings, and blinchiki, cheese-or meat-stuffed crêpes. Russia has become a major importer of American hot dogs. By 2001 53 million pounds of pork and chicken wieners and bologna were being consumed as cheap food and sales of American chicken have skyrocketed.

Many parts of Asia have adopted elements of Western culture, none more rapidly than South Korea. With considerable American help and military presence, South Korea is now an industrial powerhouse and has imported a great deal of Western food. American fast-food outlets abound in South Korean cities and the Danish Steff Houlberg company has a hot dog place in one of Seoul’s major indoor markets. Hot dog stands selling skinless, pork-based hot dogs with mustard, can be found along major highways, as can stands in cities. However, Koreans have a long street food tradition and have used deep-frying techniques since at least the sixteenth century. A fish cake, akin to the Japanese kamaboko – made from seasoned ground fish, placed on a stick and deep fried – is a ubiquitous dish, but it is now rivalled by a hot dog dipped in batter, rolled in cut-up French fries and deep fried. This lumpy, greasy delight is one of the numerous cousins of the American hot dog to be found at fast food stands in Seoul markets such as the Namdaemun. There, batter-dipped, bacon-wrapped, even seaweed-coated hot dogs are available. Koreans are among the world’s most enterprising people, so it should not be too long before French fry-festooned hot dogs appear around the world.

Hot dogs are now common in Asia, where American fast food culture has taken root. The Filipino chain Jollibee has become international.

For a modern country with strong American ties, Japan possesses few hot dog stands. Batter-dipped dogs are often available, as in South Korea, but there is nothing like that country’s street food tradition. In the 1980s a group of investors brought expert Chicago hot dog stand owners and people from Vienna Beef to Japan for advice, but these have never been greatly successful. Japanese entrepreneurs might model themselves on Vancouver’s celebrated cart, Japadog, which serves hot dogs topped with nori, shredded daikon, miso and wasabi-flavoured mayonnaise, along with the more traditional Canadian hot dog.

American interaction with Korea since the Second World War has introduced hot dogs to Koreans, along with other fast foods.

China has seen ever-increasing numbers of hot dog stands since the opening of that country’s economy to the West in the 1990s. Those cities with the greatest numbers of Western visitors have the best: Shanghai (Orange Dog), Jinzhou (American hot dog stand) and, in a strategic tourist-orientated move, mobile wagons in Beijing, starting at Beihai Park and Beijing Funpark. American Brunch Fast Food International Franchise Company’s hot dog carts were expected to have given out more than a thousand franchises by 2010, many in anticipation of the 2008 summer Olympics. Most of these hot dogs are plain, skinless, pork-based products served with standard mustard and ketchup, and nothing like the great street food of China.[6]

Hot dog entrepreneurs know no geographic boundaries. In Africa, boerwurst (‘farmer’s sausage’) has been part of the Afrikaans culinary repertoire since the Dutch settlements of the seventeenth century. Today, the beef and pork spicy boer-wurst is commonly grilled for private and public dining and can be used as a hand-held food. Hot dogs proper, sold from carts and vans, are ordinary sights in South Africa’s cities. BP, the oil company, operates food shops called Wild Bean in countries around the world. In South Africa’s Wild Bean a Hot Dog Café is featured, serving several styles that are very American in character – Traditional, Chilli, Cheese and Double Cheese. Interestingly, the only other country where Wild Bean serves hot dogs is the Netherlands.

Rapidly modernizing India has also taken to hot dogs, at least among its younger urban inhabitants. In cities such as Chennai, Calcutta and Mumbai, hot dogs grace public venues and, even in smaller towns, festivals such as the Thrissur Pooram in Kerala where they appear on food stall menus along with dosas and super spicy hot fish and manioc dishes. One company, F&B All American Diner, has planned to ‘Indianize’ hot dogs with chicken-based products such as a ‘Makhni Hot Dog’ in which curries are mixed with ‘Chilli Con Carne and grilled onions’. If hamburgers have been adapted to Indian sensibilities, then hot dogs can be too, for that is the nature of Indian history and food – to absorb outside influences and make them Indian.[7]

Perhaps unexpectedly, Malaysia is a hotbed of hot dogs. The American chain A&W has had outlets around the country for some time. In 2001 they launched Hot Dog Fiesta outlets featuring new toppings to go on their 2-ounce chicken hot dogs, Spicy Sambal, Creamy Curry, Syiok Satay and the A&W Classic Hot Dog, the latter with chilli sauce.[8]

Another chain is 1901 Sdn Bhd, a hot dog franchising company founded in Malaysia in 1997. The name comes from a conflation of the TAD cartoon and St Louis World’s Fair myths, but the ideas behind the company would be appreciated by Harry M. Stevens himself. Based on a hot dog stand founded by Tengku Rozidar and En Ahmad Zahir, serving certified halal hot dogs, the company has grown to 70 outlets in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Small-scale stand operators have the opportunity to make their ways in the world by selling fast food in a market that in Asia is not just local but global. The hot dog line includes a ‘New York’ style, served on a ‘hoagie’ (a Philadelphia term for submarine sandwich) bun with tomato sauce, a ‘Chicago’ with relish and tomato sauces in a similar bun, a supposed Texan – chicken sausage with barbecue sauce and pepper flakes, and ‘Deutsch Doodle Dang Beef’, a beef sausage with mashed potatoes, sauerkraut, black pepper sauce, chilli flakes, and New York Dressing. Such are the ways that ethnic cuisines are translated across cultural boundaries and adapted by others – by entrepreneurs working at the lowest layer of the economic system. It is the story of the hot dog.

The Hot Dog Factory

1. Selected trimmings are cut and ground into small pieces and put into the mixer. Formulas are continuously weighed to assure the proper balance of all ingredients.

2. A high-speed, stainless steel chopper blends meat, spices and curing ingredients into an emulsion or batter.

3. The emulsion is pumped and fed into a stuffer. Shirred strands of cellulose casings are mechanically positioned on the stuffing horn. As the emulsion flows through the horn into the casing, the filled strands are linked into hot dogs of exact size. The strand is then put on the smokehouse conveyor system.

4. In smokehouses, under controlled temperature and humidity, the hot dog is fully cooked and hard-wood smoked for texture, colour and a delicious flavour.

5. After passing through the smoke and cook cycle, and being showered in cool water, the hot dog goes into the peeler. Here, the protective, air- and smoke-permeable cellulose casing ‘skin’ is stripped away and individual links are conveyed to the packaging line.

6. Finally, the hot dog is conveyed to scales which divert off-weight sausages, and is then fed into the vacuum packaging equipment. Here, individual packages of exact number and precise weight are wrapped and vacuum sealed.

7. Once packaged and boxed, hot dogs are moved to storage coolers and loaded onto refrigerated trucks for delivery. The entire process, from cut trimmings to the consumer’s table, is often measured in a matter of hours.

Based on ‘Hot Dog Factory Tour’, from www.hot-dog.org.

Recipes

Chicago-style Hot Dog

The classic Chicago-style hot dog is a combination of flavours and textures. The fresher the ingredients, the better. This is for one hot dog and can be expanded to as many as desired.

Ingredients

all-beef hot dog, 2 oz/55 g or more, preferably natural casing

poppy seed bun, split

yellow mustard

green relish (piccalilli)

chopped onions

2–4 tomato slices

2 pickle spears

sport peppers (mildly spicy to hot, 2-inch long, pickled)

dash celery salt (optional)

Place the hot dog in a pan of simmering water. To preserve flavour and texture, do not leave any longer than 20 minutes. While the hot dog is heating, heat the poppy seed bun on a wire rack set over the pan of hot water, until soft. Remove the hot dog and place in the bun. Add toppings in amounts to taste in order. The tomatoes should be set along each edge of the hot dog, the sport peppers alongside them and the pickle spears on top of the assembled hot dog. Sprinkle with celery salt, if desired. Eat holding the hot dog away from the body, or wear a bib.

Note: tomato ketchup is anathema to the true Chicago hot dog aficionado, so do not tempt fate by putting out a bottle of the stuff.

Dry Coney Sauce

Coney Dogs are found across the United States and the rest of the world. The original Coney sauce, a kind of thin chilli, hails from the Detroit–Flint–Jackson area of Michigan (though Cincinnati has a claim, as does the American south-west). This is an adaptation of the sauce made by Koegel, the main supplier of Flint Coney stands. The original ingredients list is as follows: ‘Beef Hearts, Beef Suet, Water, Wheat Flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, potassium bromate, iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), Cracker Meal (wheat flour, salt), Textured Vegetable Protein (soy flour, caramel colouring), Spices, Salt, Paprika, Sugar, Maltodextrin, Onion Powder, Garlic Powder, Spice Extractives.’

This recipe is for the classic ‘dry‘ sauce.

Ingredients

½ lb/230 g beef heart

½ lb beef kidney

2 tablespoons paprika

2 tablespoons mild chilli powder

½ cup/120 ml beef suet or cooking oil

salt and pepper to taste

water as needed

Grind the beef hearts and kidneys to a coarse consistency. Mix together with the beef suet or oil and salt in a large bowl. Place in a frying pan and cook on a low heat, stirring from time to time. Add water as needed to thin the consistency and prevent burning. The final result is a fairly dry, crumbly ‘sauce’.

Franks and Beans

From the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council

Franks and beans is a classic American dish that is often claimed to be from New England. In reality it is a variation on a standard European casserole, beans made with pork. It has many variations, one of which is ‘specials’, once common in Jewish delicatessens, featuring ‘knockwurst’ – thick beef sausages – served with Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce.

This is a southern version courtesy of the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council. It is similar to one found in Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Cookbook (1968), where it is described as ‘New England’.

8 slices bacon

1 cup chopped onion

1 pound/500 g hot dogs, cut into ½-inch circles

1 15–16-ounce/500 g can baked beans with liquid

1 15–16 ounce/500 g can red kidney beans, rinsed and drained

1 cup/230 ml ketchup

½ cup/115 ml hickory-smoke barbecue sauce

½ cup/115 ml brown sugar

1 teaspoon dry mustard

½ teaspoon salt

¼ teaspoon black pepper

½ cup/115 ml grated cheddar cheese

¼ cup/57 ml chopped sweet onion

Directions

In a large skillet, cook bacon over medium heat, until bacon is crisp and brown. Remove from skillet and drain on clean paper towels. Reserve 1 tablespoon of pan drippings and discard remaining drippings. Crumble bacon and reserve until serving.

Sauté onion and hot dogs in reserved pan drippings until onions and hot dogs are lightly brown.

Transfer to a medium-size slow cooker and stir in beans, ketchup, barbecue sauce, sugar, mustard, salt and pepper. Stir well.

Cover and cook on LOW setting for 6 to 8 hours or on HIGH setting for 2–3 hours, stirring occasionally.

Divide into bowls and sprinkle each serving with reserved bacon, grated cheese and chopped onion. Yield: 6 cups

Barbecued Frankfurters

The hot dog goes naturally with barbecue because it is often considered an ‘outdoor’ food. This iteration is oven-made and is adapted from the 1941 edition of the Better Homes and Garden Cookbook (Des Moines, IA, 1941), pp. 14–15. This might be the canonical version of the dish since it has appeared in community cookbooks in one form or another for many years.

Ingredients

2 tablespoons lard

½ cup/80 g chopped onions

1 cup/240 ml tomato ketchup

½ cup/115 ml water

2 tablespoons brown sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons vinegar

¼ cup/60 ml lemon juice

3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

2 teaspoons prepared mustard

½ cup/60 g chopped celery

12 frankfurters

Heat the lard in a deep frying pan over a medium heat. Add the onions and cook until transparent. Add the rest of the ingredients except the frankfurters, and mix well. Bring to the boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 20 minutes. Add more water if necessary. Prick the frankfurters and add to the pan. Cover and simmer for another 15 minutes. Serves 6.

Cheese Frankfurters

—from Ruth Berolzheimer, ed., The United States Regional Cookbook, 1939

Cheese-filled or -wrapped hot dogs are very popular in America and elsewhere, especially with children. Many recipes were born from the test kitchens of cheese manufacturers such as Kraft Foods which popularized processed cheese under the name ‘American cheese’ and, later, marketed wrapped cheese slices. By the 1920s there were many varieties. This one resembles Pigs in Blankets.

12 frankfurters

12 slices bacon

½ lb American cheese

Cut a lengthwise slit in each frankfurter. Cut strip of American cheese the length of the frankfurter and about ¼ inch thick. Fill the slit with the strip of cheese; wrap a slice of bacon around each stuffed frankfurter and fasten ends with toothpick. Broil frankfurters slowly, turning often, until the bacon and the frankfurters are cooked through and browned. Serves 6.

Corn Dogs

—from the John Morrell Company of Cincinnati

Corn Dogs are another popular variation, one that has spread across the globe in one form or another. They arose from the southern hush puppy – deep fried corn batter – and date back to at least the 1920s.

oil for deep frying, at 375°

1/3 (stock)cups corn meal

2/3 cup flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon dry mustard

1 teaspoon baking powder

salt to taste

½ cup milk

1 egg, lightly beaten

1 tablespoon melted shortening

6 frankfurters

6 skewers or sticks

Combine the cornmeal, flour, sugar, mustard, baking powder and salt, mixing well. Add the milk, egg and shortening, mixing until very smooth. Pour the mixture into a tall glass. Put the frankfurters on sticks. Dip them into the cornmeal batter to coat them evenly. Deep fry in oil heated to 375 degrees until golden brown, about two minutes. Drain on paper towels. Serves 6.

Curried Hot Dogs

The hot dog in India is a recent phenomenon, but the paradigmatic Anglo-Indian dish is ‘curry’. Curry in recipes appears in the English-speaking world as early as the eighteenth century, but not in hot dogs until the famous currywurst of post-Second World War Germany. This is an American version adapted from Murray Handwerker’s Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Cookbook.

Ingredients

8 hot dogs

2 small onions, chopped

1 cored apple, chopped

3 tablespoons butter or margarine, melted

1 tablespoon curry powder

1 tablespoon flour

1 cup chicken broth (stock)

Sauté the onions, apple and hot dogs, cut crosswise into 1-inch slices, in the butter until the onions are transparent. Combine the curry powder and flour, and stir this mixture carefully into the bouillon, stirring constantly to blend. Bring to the boil and add the hot dog mixture. Cover and simmer for about 10 minutes, until hot dogs are heated through. Serve with rice. Serves 4.

Pancit Bihon with Hot Dogs

The Filipino fast food company, Jollibee, is expanding to markets around the world. Hot dogs appear prominently on its menu. Hot dogs can and have replaced the Filipino pork longaniza sausage. A classic dish, Pancit represents a merging of the cultures that compose the population of the Philippines.

½ cup/120 ml soy sauce

3–4 cups (680–910 ml) chicken broth (stock)

1 lb/450 g rice noodles

2–3 tablespoons canola oil

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1 cup/140 g skinless, boneless chicken breast, thinly sliced

1 onion, cut into strips

1 cup/70 g shredded cabbage

1 cup/110 g grated carrot

1 celery stalk, cut into strips

4 oz (200g) hot dogs, cut into ½-inch rounds

salt to taste

½ cup/50 g chopped green onions

Place the soy sauce and chicken broth in a deep pan and place over a high heat. Add the rice noodles and cook, stirring and separating until soft. Remove the noodles from the pan and set aside.

Place the oil in a large, wide frying pan and heat over a medium heat. Add the garlic and cook until just soft. Add the chicken breast and cook until just done. Remove from the pan, add a little more oil, heat and add the vegetables. Cook until the onion is translucent. Add the chicken, hot dogs and cooked noodles to the pan and season with salt to taste. Stir and mix, adding soy-broth liquid as needed to keep the noodles from sticking and burning. The final dish is slightly moist. Serves 4–6.

Pigs in a Kimono

—from the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council

Hot dogs have become something of an Asian phenomenon, just as Japanese sushi has become ubiquitous in the West. Here’s an ‘Asianized’ recipe.

Preheat oven to 400°F

1 16-ounce package hot dogs (8 to a package) drained

½ cup teriyaki sauce

16 (2¾ x 3½-inch) wonton wraps

2 tablespoon white sesame seeds

1 tablespoon black sesame seeds

Accompaniments

Hoisin sauce, sweet/sour sauce and Chinese mustard

Cut each hot dog in half (measuring about 2½ inches). In a shallow dish, marinate hot dogs in teriyaki sauce for 30 minutes. Set aside teriyaki sauce.

Line a large shallow baking sheet with parchment paper. Fold each wonton wrap in half, lengthwise, measuring 1 ⅓ x 3½ inches. Wrap one folded wonton wrap around each hot dog half. Gently press edges to seal. Lightly brush teriyaki sauce over wonton wraps. Combine sesame seeds and lightly dip each wrapped hot dog into sesame seeds.

Place wrapped hot dogs, 1-inch apart, seam side down, on baking sheet. Bake in preheated oven for 12 minutes or until wonton wraps are golden brown. Immediately transfer to cooling rack.

Serve warm with hoisin sauce, Chinese mustard and/or sweet and sour sauce. Makes 16.

Arizona Hot Dogs

One of the more interesting cross-cultural hot dogs creations is the Sonoran hot dog found in the Mexican state of Sonora and in neighbouring Arizona. Its usual ingredients are a grilled hot dog wrapped in bacon, pinto beans, grilled onions, grilled hot red or yellow pepper, grated cheese, chopped onions, chopped coriander, chopped tomato, hot chilli sauce, mayonnaise and mustard. Here is a simpler version adapted from an Oscar Mayer recipe.

Ingredients

6 beef frankfurters

3 yellow, red or green bell peppers, roasted, peeled and seeded

½ cup/80 g chopped red onion

1 fresh jalapeño pepper, seeded, finely chopped

1 clove garlic, minced

6 hot dog buns, partially split

¼ cup/5 g chopped coriander

Heat a grill, place frankfurters on it and grill until heated through, turning frequently.

Meanwhile, cut the bell peppers into strips and place them in a medium bowl. Add the onion, jalapeño peppers and garlic and mix lightly. Place the cooked frankfurters in buns, top with the pepper mixture and sprinkle chopped coriander on top. Makes 6.

NOTE: you can try the other Sonoran-style ingredients but if using bacon be sure that it is thoroughly cooked before eating.

References

1 Hot Dog History

1   John Lawton, ‘Mesopotamian Menus’, Saudi Aramco World (March/April 1988).

2   See the recipe in Andrew Dalby and Sally Granger, A Classical Cookbook (Los Angeles, CA, 1996).

3   The common Braunschweiger (or Brunswick sausage), a liver sausage, descends from a class attested as Raphioles in late fourteenth-century The Forme of Cury. See Constance B. Hieatt and Sharon Butler, Curye on Inglish: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth-Century (Including the Forme of Cury) (New York, 1985).

4   Craig Whitlock, ‘Germans Take Pride in the Wurst; 1432 Decree Shows Thuringian Sausage May Have Been Nation’s First Regulated Food’, Washington Post (2 December 2007).

5   Heller’s Secrets of Meat Curing and Sausage Making [1905] (Chicago, IL, 1929) p. 206.

6   Eliza Smith, The Compleat Housewife or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion (Williamsburg, VA, 1742) was taken from the longer English version; Mrs Lettice Bryan, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati, OH, 1839).

7   Thomas Farrington De Voe, The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn (New York, 1867), p. 102.

8   Ibid.

9   Artemas Ward, The Grocer’s Encyclopedia (or Encyclopedia of Foods and Beverages) (New York, 1911), pp. 553–9.

10  ‘Meat for the Multitudes’, The National Provisioner, 185/1 (4 July 1981) vol. II, p. 108.

11  Barry Popik in Comments on Etymology, October/November 2007, vol. XXXVII/1–2, pp. 31–5.

12  Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Golden Age (New York, 1989 [1971]), pp. 51–2.

13  Quentin Reynolds, ‘Peanut Vendor, and Father of the Hot Dog,’ Collier’s (19 October 1935).

14  Leonard Zwilling, ‘A TAD Lexicon’ in Gerard Cohen, ed., Etymology and Linguistic Principles, vol. III (Rolla, MO, 1993). Cited in Gerald Leonard Cohen, Barry A. Popik and David Shulman, The Origin of the Term ‘Hot Dog’ (Rolla, MO, 2004), pp. 282–3.

15  Grantland Rice, ‘The Sportlight’, New York Sun (5 May 1943). Cited in Cohen, Popik and Shulman, Origin of the Term, p. 272.

16  Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier and the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, 1985), p. 33.

17  For the story and discussion of food myths, see: ftp.apci.net/~truax/1904wf/WF_Myths–Food.htm#hotdog.

18  Richard F. Snow, Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire (New York, 1984), p. 56. Discovered by Barry Popik and sited in Cohen, Popik and Shulman, Origin of the Term, pp. 269–70.

19  Brooklyn Eagle (7 March 1886), p. 11.

20  As in the later children’s song:

There was a Dutchman

His name was Johnnie Verbeck

He was a dealer in sausages and sauerkraut and spec

He makes the finest sausages that ever you did see

But one day he invented a wonderful sausage machine. Oh, Mister Johnnie Verbeck How could you be so mean?

I told you you’d be sorry for inventing that machine.

All the neighbors’ cats and dogs

Will never more be seen,

For they’ll be ground to sausage meat

In Johnnie Verbeck’s machine.

From Boy Scout Songbook (New Brunswick, NJ, 1963); see www.mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=8781  for the music.

21  Brooklyn Daily Times (March 2004), p. 2. This, and many other items detailing the history of the term ‘hot dog’ have been uncovered by researcher Barry Popik, cited in Cohen, Popik and Shulman, Origin of the Term, p. 233.

22  See the excellent compilation in Cohen, Popik and Shulman, Origin of the Term, pp. 67–150 and Barry Popik’s blog: barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/hot_dog _polo_grounds_myth_original_monograph.

23  library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/keffer/winners.html. The folk song is ‘Z’ Lauterbach han I mein Strumpf verlor’n’ or, ‘I lost my socks in Lauterbach’.

24  David Shulman, ‘My research on hot dogs’, Comments on Etymology, 20/8, pp. 14–16, cited in Cohen, Popik and Shulman, Origin of the Term, p. 13, and personal communication.

25  The Yale Record, 1/5 (5 October 1895), cited in Cohen, Popik and Shulman, Origin of the Term, p. 26. Popik reports an even earlier hot dog attestation dating to 1893.

26  barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/hot_dog_polo_grounds_myth_original_monograph.

27  Holger Kersten, ‘Using the Immigrant’s Voice: Humor and Pathos in Nineteenth Century “Dutch” Dialect Texts’, MELUS, 21/4, and Ethnic Humor (winter 1996), pp. 3–17.

28  Ibid., p. 8.

2 How Hot Dogs are Made

1   hot-dog.org/ht/d/sp/i/1683/pid/1683.

2   ‘Meat for the Multitudes’, The National Provisioner, 185/1 (4 July 1981), vol. II, p. 108. See also Roger Horowitz, Meat on the American Table: Taste Technology, Transformation (Baltimore, MD, 2006), p. 85.

3   Ibid.

4   Horowitz, Meat on the American Table, p. 85; ‘Meat for the Multitudes’, p. 108.

5   Interview with Curtis Slotkin of the Hygrade (Ballpark brand) Company (March 1990).

6   Horowitz, Meat on the American Table, p. 87.

7   Ibid., pp. 91–2.

8   The National Provisioner, p. 112.

9   Code of Federal Regulations (US), 9, vol. II (revised 1 January 2003), p. 296.

10  The National Provisioner, p. 109.

11  A. Estes Reynolds Jr. and George A. Schuler, ‘Sausage and Smoked Meat Formulation and Processing’, Bulletin 865, Cooperative Extension Service (Athens, GA, 1982): uga.edu/nchfp/how/cure_smoke/sausage_ingredients.html.

12  Interview with Pat Luby, Vice President of Marketing, Oscar Mayer Company (February 1991).

13  Bernard Amstutz et al., Schweitzer Wurstwaren (Herausgegeben von der Schweizerischen Fachshule für das Metzgereigewerbe Spiez), pp. 47, 54.

14  Interview with Earl Auerbach, Vice President of Development, Kosher Zion Company (June 1990).

15  Code of Federal Regulations, 305–6.

16  I. V. Savic, ‘Small-scale Sausage Production’, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Rome, 1985): fao.org/docrep/003/x6556e/X6556E02.htm.

17  Interview with Carl Gylfe, Vice President of Marketing, Hygrade Company (March 1990).

3 How Hot Dogs are Sold

1   Archibald A. Hill, ‘The Pushcart Peddlers of New York’, The Independent, 61 (1906)

2   Wendell P. Dodge, ‘The Pushcart Industry’, The New Age Magazine, May 1910, pp. 406–12.

3   See Bruce Kraig, ‘The American Hot Dog Stand’: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium, ‘Public Eating’ (Oxford, 1992), pp. 174–7.

4   ‘Best Strategies: Hot Dogs’ The National Provisioner Online, www.provisioneronline.com   (2005).

5   Interview with Pat Luby, Vice President and Corporate Economist, Oscar Mayer Co., February 1990.

6   Interview with Oscar G. Mayer, Jr., March 1990.

7   Andrea Kannapell, ‘HOT DIGGITY! DOG DIGGITY! – HOTDOG-GERS: Taking the Wiener to the World’, New York Times (24 May 1998). See also Anon., Links with the Past: A History of Oscar Mayer & Co. (Madison, WI, 1979).

8   Doug Moe, ‘His Wiener Jingle Was a Winner’, Capital Times (14 January 2005).

9   James U. McNeal, The Kids Market: Myth and Realities (Ithaca, NY, 1999).

10  Carroll Brinson, Tradition of Looking Ahead: The Story of Bryan Foods (Jackson, MS, 1986).

4 Hot Dog Culture

1   Donna Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 93–22.

2   Interview with Emmy Schwartz (a Ladanyi), January 1990.

3   Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, 4th edn (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995).

4   Timothy Charles Lloyd, ‘The Cincinnati Chili Culinary Complex’, in Foodways and Eating Habits: Directions for Research, ed. Michael Owen Jones (Los Angeles, CA, 1983), pp. 28–40.

5   See Sol Tax, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Washington DC, 1953) and John Benson, The Penny Capitalists: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working-class Entrepreneurs (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983).

6   ‘Former Professor Peddling Peanuts on NWU Campus’ Chicago Daily Tribune (24 September 1913).

7   David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, IL, 1958). See also Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1995).

8   ‘The American Hot Dog: Standardized taste and Regional Variation’, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium (Oxford, 1987).

9   Interview with Gregory Papalexis, President, Marathon Enterprises, May 1992.

10  Information supplied by Prof. Ilona Middleton, Medaille College, Buffalo, NY.

11  Bob Schwartz, Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog (Chicago, IL, 2008).

12  www.wvhotdogs.com.

13  James W. Meade, ‘Hail the Hot Dog’, The Atlanta Constitution (13 April 1913).

14  www.caspershotdogs.com/menu.php.

5 Hot Dogs Around the World

1   Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, new edn (New York, 1997 [1880]).

2   National Hot Dog and Sausage Council: hot-dog.org.

3   ‘British “Hot Dogs” Don Overcoats for Football Games’, Chicago Daily Tribune (30 October 1927).

4   National Hot Dog and Sausage Council.

5   P. J. O’Rourke, Holidays in Hell (New York, 2000), p. 77.

6   http://kuching2.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/chinanews.

7   ‘Hot Dog? Everything is In The Name’, The Times of India (13 February 2004): timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/494068.cms.

8   ‘A&W launches Hot Dog Fiesta’, New Straits Times-Management Times (9 March 2001): nst.com.my.

Select Bibliography

Amstutz, Bernard et al., Schweitzer Wurstwaren (Herausgegeben von der Schweizerischen Fachshule für das Metzgereigewerbe Spiez)

Barry, Dan, ‘He Confirmed It, Yes He Did: The Wicked Witch Was Dead’, New York Times (18 February 2007)

Benson, John, The Penny Capitalists: A Study of Nineteenth-century Working-class Entrepreneurs (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983)

Boy Scout Songbook (New Brunswick, NJ, 1963)

Brinson, Carroll, Tradition of Looking Ahead: The Story of Bryan Foods (Jackson, MS, 1986)

‘British “Hot Dogs” Don Overcoats for Football Games’, Chicago Daily Tribune (30 October 1927)

Bryan, Mrs Lettice, The Kentucky Housewife (Cincinnati, OH, 1839)

Code of Federal Regulations (US), 9, vol. II (revised 1 January 2003)

Cohen, Gerald Leonard, Barry A. Popik and David Shulman, The Origin of the Term ‘Hot Dog’ (Rolla, MO, 2004)

Dalby, Andrew and Sally Granger, A Classical Cookbook (Los Angeles, CA, 1996)

Dodge, Wendell P., ‘The Pushcart Industry’, The New Age Magazine (May 1910), pp. 406–12

Durso, Joseph, Casey and Mr. McGraw (St Louis, MO, 1989)

Gabaccia, Donna, We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1998)

Grier, Katherine C., Pets in America: A History (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006)

Heller’s Secrets of Meat Curing and Sausage Making [1905] (Chicago, IL, 1929)

Hieatt, Constance B. and Sharon Butler, Curye on Inglish: English Culinary Manuscripts of the Fourteenth-Century (Including the Forme of Cury) (New York, 1985)

Hill, Archibald A., ‘The Pushcart Peddlers of New York’, The Independent, 61 (1906)

Holli, Melvin G. and Peter d’A. Jones, Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait, 4th edn (Grand Rapids, MI, 1995)

Horowitz, Roger, Meat on the American Table: Taste Technology, Transformation (Baltimore, MD, 2006)

Kannapell, Andrea, ‘HOT DIGGITY! DOG DIGGITY! – HOTDOGGERS: Taking the Wiener to the World’, New York Times (24 May 1998)

Kersten, Holger, ‘Using the Immigrant’s Voice: Humor and Pathos in Nineteenth Century “Dutch” Dialect Texts’, MELUS, 21/4, and Ethnic Humor (Winter 1996)

Kraig, Bruce, ‘The American Hot Dog: Standardized taste and Regional Variation’, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium (Oxford, 1987)

____, ‘The American Hot Dog Stand’, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium, ‘Public Eating’, (Oxford, 1992)

____, ‘The Iconography of American Fast Food’, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium (Oxford, 1992)

Lawton, John, ‘Mesopotamian Menus’, Saudi Aramco World (March/April 1988)

Lears, Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York, 1995)

Links with the Past: A History of Oscar Mayer & Co. (Madison, WI, 1979)

Lloyd, Timothy C., ‘The Cincinnati Chili Culinary Complex’ in Barbara G. Shortridge and James R. Shortridge, The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods (Boston, MA, 1998)

McNeal, James U., The Kids Market: Myth and Realities (Ithaca, NY, 1999)

Marchello, Martin and Julie Garden-Robinson, ‘The Art and Practice of Sausage Making’, North Dakota State University Extension, HE-176 (December 1998): ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/foods/he176w.htm

Meade, James W., ‘Hail the Hot Dog’, The Atlanta Constitution, (13 April 1913)

‘Meat for the Multitudes’, The National Provisioner, 185/1 (4 July 1981)

Moe, Doug, ‘His Wiener Jingle Was a Winner’, Capital Times (14 January 2005)

National Provisioner Online, the, ‘Best Strategies: Hot Dogs’, (2005): provisioneronline.com.

O’Rourke, P. J., Holidays in Hell (New York, 2000)

Paulucci, Jeno F., Jeno, The Power of the Peddler (Ashland, OH, 2006)

Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago, IL, 1958)

Raeder, Ole Munch, trans. and ed. Gunnar J. Malmin, America in the Forties: The Letters of Ole Munch Raeder (Minneapolis, IN, 1929)

Reynolds, Quentin, ‘Peanut Vendor, and Father of the Hot Dog’, Collier’s (19 October 1935)

Rice, Grantland, ‘The Sportlight’, New York Sun (5 May 1943)

Savic, I. V., ‘Small-scale Sausage Production’, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (Rome, 1985): fao.org/docrep/003/x6556e/x6556E02.htm

Schwartz, Bob, Never Put Ketchup on a Hot Dog (Chicago, IL, 2008)

Seymour, Harold, Baseball: The Golden Age [1971] (New York, 1989)

Shulman, David, ‘My Research on Hot Dogs’, Comments on Etymology, XX/9 (May 1991)

Slotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier and the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York, 1985)

Smith, Eliza, The Compleat Housewife or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion (Williamsburg, VA, 1742)

Snow, Richard F., Coney Island: A Postcard Journey to the City of Fire (New York, 1984)

Tax, Sol, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Washington, DC, 1953)

Twain, Mark, A Tramp Abroad, new edn (New York, 1997 [1880]) De Voe, Thomas Farrington, The Market Assistant, Containing a Brief Description of Every Article of Human Food Sold in the Public Markets of the Cities of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn (New York, 1867)

Ward, Artemas, The Grocer’s Encyclopedia (or Encyclopedia of Foods and Beverages) (New York, 1911)

Whitlock, Craig, ‘Germans Take Pride in the Wurst; 1432 Decree Shows Thuringian Sausage May Have Been Nation’s First Regulated Food’, Washington Post (2 December 2007)

Zwilling, Leonard, ‘A TAD Lexicon’ in Gerald Cohen, ed.,Etymology and Linguistic Principles, vol. III (Rolla, MO, 1993)

Websites and Associations

Hot Dog Manufacture

The Art and Practice of Sausage Making

ag.ndsu.edu/pubs/yf/foods/he176w.htm

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:

Sausage Raw Materials

fao.org/docrep/003/x6556e/X6556E02.htm

National Center for Home Food Preservation:

How Do I Cure and Smoke?

uga.edu/nchfp/how/cure_smoke/sausage_ingredients.html

National Hot Dog & Sausage Council

hot-dog.org

National Provisioner

provisioneronline.com

Hot Dog Fans

Hot Dog Chicago Style: Fun Facts

hotdogchicagostyle.com/funfacts.php

The Hot Dog Hall of Fame

thehotdoghalloffame.com

West Virginia Hot Dogs

wvhotdogs.com

Hot Dog History and Mythology

The Big Apple: Food and Drink

barrypopik.com

ftp.apci.net/~truax/1904wf/WF_Myths–Food.htm#hotdog

eatingsuburbia.blogspot.com/2006/06/food-miscellany.html

snopes.com/language/stories/hotdog.asp

Acknowledgements

My gratitude is offered to the many people and institutions that made this book possible. First is to the series editor, Andy Smith, who allowed me to do this project. Barry Popik, Austin Texas, Professor Gerald Cohen, Rolla, Missouri, and the late David Shulman of New York, all contributors to the American Dialect Society, are the linguistic archaeologists without whose work the true history of the hot dog could not have been written. Their publication, Origin of the Word ‘Hot Dog’, is the seminal work.

For information about the hot dog business and lots of trivia, The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council is the place to visit and its director, Janet Riley, the go-to person. Bob Schwartz of Vienna Beef, raconteur and hot dog expert, has provided many a good tale of the business and introduced me to great hot dog stands in Chicago. Frank ‘Uncle Frank’ Webster from San Diego, California, keeper of the Frankfurter Chronicles and The Hot Dog Hall of Fame, is an invaluable guide to hot dog news and ephemera; his Frankie Award has pride of place on my mantel-piece. The same kind of thanks go to the many people across the United States in the hot dog industry, from manufacturers to sellers, who have given so much information; they are too numerous to enumerate here. Others who provided valuable information are Professor Ilona Middleton of Medaille College, Buffalo, New York for white hots in her region of the world, Bjørn Vidar Holtung, who provided help on hot dogs and sausages in Scandinavia and northern Europe, and Professor William Lockwood for putting me onto the Balkan origins of Coneys and Michigan hot dogs in general. For basic research on hot dog restaurants, there is nothing like food blogs. By far the best in Chicago is the LTH-Forum.com.

My gratitude goes to members Catherine Lambrecht, Peter Engler, Gary Wiviott and Andy Bloom for photographs used in the book and their reviews of eating places. Other photographs were provided by my fellow student of hot dog stand iconography and aesthetics, Patty Carroll of Chicago. Thanks also to culinary historian Gary Allen for photographs of classic hot dogs at Hot Doug’s. Special thanks are due to Andrew Hudson, Illinois Valley Central High School, Chillicothe, Illinois, whose painting of a delectable dachshund appears in these pages. For other illustrations, I thank the Feeding America project at the Michigan State University Library, John Hopkins University Library for its Levy Sheet Music Collection, the Chicago History Museum, the San Diego Historical Society, the Library of Congress and the Vienna Beef Company.

Last, I am thankful for many friends who have taken keen interests in the subject and have encouraged me for years to write this book. Not the least of these is my wife, Jan Thompson, whose love of hot dogs has led to eating more hot dogs and French fries than one might like to have, or even admit.

Photo Acknowledgements

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the below sources of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Locations of some artworks are also given below.

Courtesy of/collection of the author: pp. 11, 20, 44, 63, 73, 76, 79, 83, 87, 88, 98, 109, 110; photos by Patty Carroll: pp. 60, 62, 67, 85, 86, 92; courtesy Professor Gerald Cohen: pp. 26–7, 28, 29, 40; photo courtesy Peter Engle: p. 61; courtesy Feeding America project, Michigan University Library: p. 21; from Heller’s Sausage-Making Secrets, 1925: p. 47; Hot Doug’s, Courtesy Gary Allen: p. 14; courtesy Illinois Tourism Board: p. 84; photo courtesy Catherine Lambrecht: p. 70; photos Michael Leaman/Reaktion Books: pp. 101, 105, 107; courtesy Levy Sheet Music Collection, John Hopkins University Library: p. 36; Library of Congress, Washington, DC: pp. 30, 31, 35, 42, 48, 49, 51, 58, 82; photo Magruder’s, San Diego: p. 93; courtesy National Hot Dog and Sausage Council: pp. 6, 12, 115; courtesy San Diego Historical Society: p. 93; courtesy Vienna Beef Company: pp. 71, 72; courtesy ‘Uncle’ Frank Webster: p. 36; photo courtesy Gary Wiviott: p. 103.

Index

italic numbers refer to illustrations; bold to recipes

advertising, marketing, branding 65–73

Allen Gauge and Tool Company (FAMCO) 50

American Dialect Society 138

Arizona 93–4

Alabama 91

Armour (Armour-Eckrich Meats) 12, 22, 48, 50, 64

jingle 69

Atlanta, GA 44, 81, 90–91

Ballpark Brand (formerly Hygrade) 12, 58, 69

baseball 8, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 42, 56, 89

myth of hot dog name 23–5

Best Kosher Foods Corporation 71, 72

Boar’s Head Provisions, Inc. 12, 54

Brooklyn, NY 31, 33, 34, 35

Bryan Foods 58, 69, 71

Chicago, IL 13, 14, 21, 30, 34, 41, 44, 48, 50, 54, 56, 59, 60, 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 85, 86, 87, 90, 100, 110, 112, 116–17

Oscar Mayer 63–4

Maxwell Street and Vienna Beef 77, 90

Chicago-style hot dogs 78

Cincinnati, OH 22, 44, 50, 71

chilli 79, 117

Cincinnati Butcher Supply Company 46

Cohen, Gerald 126, 127, 132, 135

Coney Island 34, 35, 35, 36, 61, 62, 62, 108

Coney-style hot dogs 78, 79, 90, 91, 117–18

cookbooks

Bryan, Lettice 19

Handwerker, Murray 118, 121

Smith, Eliza 19

cooking methods 14–15

dachshunds 10, 24, 25, 38, 39, 40, 86, 94

De Voe, Thomas Farrington, 20–21

‘Der Deitcher’s Dog’ 37, 38

Detroit, MI 30, 44, 54, 63, 78, 90–91, 117

dialects in American culture 38, 41

dolma 9

Dorgan, T. A. (TAD) 25–9

enchiladas 9

ethnicities, American

Balkans, 78–9

Chinese 76–7

Germans 38, 41

Greeks 78–9

Jews 38, 77–8

Farmer John All-Beef Premium 13

Feltman, Charles 34–5

Flint, MI 78, 90–91, 117

Florida 62, 88

Frischmann, Ignatz 35

Gabaccia, Donna 76

haggis 9, 16

Hebrew National 12, 54, 71–2

Heller Seasonings and Ingredients, Inc. 47, 53–4, 55

Hobart Company (Buffalo Chopper) 46

Horowitz, Roger 49, 128

hot dog culture 75–95

hot dog history

Palaeolithic 16

ancient Greek 17

ancient Roman 17

medieval 17–19

American 19–23

hot dog ingredients 13–14, 53–6

hot dogs, international variations

Australia 102–4

Brazil 100

Canada 97–8

China 110–11

Columbia and Venezuela 99–100

Czech Republic and Slovakia 107

France 106

Germany 104

Guatemala 99

Iceland 106

India 111

Italy 106

Japan 109–10

Korea 108–9

Malaysia 111–12

Mexico 99

Netherlands 104–5

Peru and Ecuador 100

Philippines 95, 121

Poland 108

Russia 108

Scandinavia 105–6

Spain 106–7

South Africa 111

United Kingdom (England) 100–2

USA 84, 87–95 see also individual places

hot dog manufacturing 45–56, 113–15, 115

hot dog, naming of 36–44

Jackson, MI 78, 90, 117

Kansas City, MO 39, 43, 61, 94–5

kishka 9

Koegel Meats, Inc. 91, 117

Kraft Foods, Inc. 13, 68, 71, 120

Los Angeles, CA 42, 68, 85, 81, 94

manufacturing see hot dog manufacturing

Mayer, Oscar 33, 63–5 see also Oscar Mayer

mixiotes 9

Nathan’s Famous Inc. 12, 61–2, 62, 71, 89, 108, 118, 121

National Hot Dog and Sausage Council 45, 115, 118

National Pork Council 72

New England 54, 88–9, 118

New Jersey 15, 89, 90

New Orleans, LA 11, 44, 92–3

New York 14, 20, 23, 24, 25, 30, 31, 34, 35, 39, 44, 50, 54, 57, 59, 60, 61, 62, 77, 78, 81, 84, 87, 88, 89, 94, 98, 112

Oscar Mayer (Kraft Foods) 12, 52, 53–4, 57, 58, 61–8

jingle 57, 68

Wienermobile and Little Oscar 66–8

for founder see Mayer, Oscar

Pearl Meat Packing Company 13

Philadelphia 60, 67, 85, 112

Pittsburgh 50, 60, 81

Popik, Barry 39, 126, 127

Providence, RI 81

recipes

Arizona Hot Dogs 123–4

Barbecued Frankfurters 119

Cheese Frankfurters 120

Chicago-style Hot Dog 116

Corn Dogs 120–21

Curried Hot Dogs 121–2

Dry Coney Sauce 117

Franks and Beans 118–19

Pancit Bihon with Hot Dogs 122

Pigs in a Kimono 123

St Louis World’s Fair 33–4

Sabrett (Marathon Enterprises, Inc.) 13, 54, 61, 89

San Diego, CA (Mexican border) 138, 93

San Francisco (Oakland), CA 23, 44, 94

sausage types

bratwurst 18, 19, 90, 103, 104

frankfurters/franks 10, 13, 18, 19, 22, 25, 36, 36, 38, 53, 54, 55, 67, 72, 74, 75, 89, 102, 104, 106, 118, 119, 120, 121, 123–4

kielbasa 19, 90, 107, 108

Thuringer 10, 18, 19, 64, 104

Wieners/weenies 10, 18, 19, 22, 23, 34, 39, 50, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 75, 103, 104, 108

Shulman, David, 39, 126, 127, 132, 134

Springfield, IL 84, 95

Stevens, Harry Mozley 24, 25, 29–32, 33, 38, 43, 112

stuffed foods 9, 16

Swift and Company 22, 49, 50, 52

Tax, Sol 80

Toledo, OH (Tony Packo) 91

Toole, John Kennedy 93

Townsend Engineering (Frank-A-Matic) 52–3

Twain, Mark 96Usinger’s Famous Sausage 47, 67

Vienna, Austria 18, 22, 34, 58, 102

Vienna Beef Company 13, 34, 54, 71, 71, 72, 77, 85, 110

Visking Corporation (Viskase) 50

Ward, Artemas 22

West Virginia 91

Whitman, Walt 41

Wisconsin 52, 89, 90

and Oscar Mayer 65

Winner, Septimus 37–8, 38

Yale University, 39, 42