The Hot Dog: American Icon
AN EMPLOYEE of the Chicago Armour and Company meatpacking firm operates an industrial grinder in 1893.
GRANGER/ALBUM
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The Hot Dog: American Icon
It’s hard to imagine the United States without hot dogs, perfect for baseball games and cookouts, but before the industrial revolution, they were just a taste of the old country for German immigrants in the 19th century.
Hot dogs have been an iconic American food for more than a hundred years. The United States’ love affair with this meal on a bun began sometime in the late 19th century. A few places across the United States claim to be the birthplace of the hot dog, and all trace their origins to German immigrants and the preferred sausages of their hometowns.
The sausage is at the heart of many German cuisines. The central German city of Weimar, for example, issued quality standards for its Thuringian sausage in 1432. Consequently, when German immigrants arrived in American cities in the mid to late 19th century, especially in the Midwest, neighborhood butchers began churning out handmade sausages like the ones back home. Sold locally in the 1850s and 1860s, those sausages were the predecessors of what would become an American symbol.
Two main kinds of German sausage—the frankfurter, a pork sausage from the Frankfurt region, and the wiener, a sausage made with pork and beef from Vienna—conquered the American palate, according to Bruce Kraig, co-author with Patty Carroll of Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America. Kraig wrote: “They were a tasty, portable, cheap meat protein on the go. That’s American culinary culture right there.”
Sausages, Buns, and Dogs
During the industrial revolution in the States, the first steam-run meat grinders were put into use in 1868. This technology industrialized production of sausages and brought down prices, making the meat product more affordable. In cities with German enclaves, frankfurters and wieners were served at beer gardens, whose festive atmosphere, hearty food, and beer appealed to a mainly working-class clientele. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, popular entertainment in America began to boom in the summer months, as amusement parks, beaches, fairs, festivals, and baseball games filled with people. German pushcart vendors were happy to sell affordable sausages to this new market of young customers.
Food historians like Kraig say there is no single person to credit for the invention of the hot dog. The cuisine was developing in different cities across the United States around the same time, but if the hot dog has a birthplace in terms of where it first achieved iconic status, Coney Island is as close as it gets. Thanks to new railroad lines built in the late 19th century, during the summer the Brooklyn neighborhood attracted legions of New Yorkers of all social classes who strolled along the beaches and boardwalks. The hot dog vendor had the ideal market.
A native of Hanover, Charles Feltman owned a Brooklyn bakery in 1870 and is believed to have started out selling baked pies to Coney Island bathers and strollers. His customers told him hot sandwiches would be easier to eat than pies, so he had his cart adapted to sell hot dogs tucked in long buns.
The formula was a hit, allowing him to open a seafood restaurant in 1871, Feltman’s Ocean Pavilion, which catered to a wealthier clientele. Skeptics of this story point to the fact that articles found in the newspaper archives of the Brooklyn Eagle suggest he never pedaled hot dogs along the boardwalk, although he did sell them from a stand outside his restaurant. Tellingly, Feltman’s obituary in 1910 makes no mention of hot dogs.
VIENNA OR FRANKFURT?
THE VIENNA WIENER, also called the weenie, was first made in Vienna in 1805 by Johann Georg Lahner, a German butcher from Frankfurt. Unlike the all-pork frankfurter, the Lahner wiener was the first to combine pork and beef.
The true origins of the name “hot dog” are just as murky as the food itself.
Food historians like Kraig say there is no single person to credit for the invention of the hot dog bun, either. In Germany sausages were generally eaten with bread on the side, never on a roll. Some food historians believe hot dog buns evolved from German weissbrot (white bread) and adapted by German bakers in America.
One popular origin story (that has never been proven) involves Anton Feuchtwanger, a German immigrant who sold hot snacks at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904 (in some versions of the story, it’s the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair). He reputedly gave customers white gloves to eat their sausages. When no one returned them, he asked his brother to make a bun—and the hot dog roll was born.
Other accounts have more historical grounding. Ignatz Fischmann has a strong claim as inventor of the bun. An Austrian baker, his obituary in the Brooklyn Daily Times of March 7, 1904, credits him with creating “the oblong roll that the frankfurter men needed in their business.”
All these cooks built up the beginnings of hot dog culture, but it was a Polish immigrant who first worked at Feltman’s that made it an icon: Nathan Handwerker, the founder of Nathan’s Famous, later the world’s largest hot dog enterprise and sponsor of an annual hot dog eating contest, held every Fourth of July at Nathan’s on Coney Island.
The origins of the name “hot dog” are just as murky as the food itself. “Hot” is believed to have evolved from “red hot,” either because of the heat to cook them or their color; in the late 19th century, makers added red food coloring to make them look “meatier.”
A plausible explanation for “dog” is the dachshund shape of the sausage. One popular tale recounts that cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “Tad” Dorgan heard vendors shout “Get your red hot dachshund sausages!” at the Polo Grounds during a baseball game in 1906. Dorgan then used “hot dog” in a cartoon because he allegedly could not spell dachshund.
It is a nice story, but historians have debunked it: No such drawing has been found, and “hot dog” already had appeared a decade earlier. By 1894 college publications at Yale may have been the first to jokingly call vendors’ carts “dog wagons” that sold “little dogs,” or “hot dogs.” At the time, there was a popular belief that dog meat could turn up in sausages (not totally without reason), so the Ivy League origins of the term are satirical, scholars say. The dog-meat rumor prompted the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce in 1913 to forbid vendors from using the term “hot dogs”—evidently without long-term success.
SAUSAGE FACTORIES
THE MEAT INDUSTRY in the United States underwent extensive development after the Civil War to meet the demands of increasingly populated cities. Chicago, well connected to cattle centers by rail, became the heart of the industry. The meatpacking giant Armour and Company was founded in the city in 1867.
A NEW YORK street vendor serves frankfurters and lemonade at his stand in 1926.
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Hot Dog Variations
True to its German roots, the first hot dogs in the United States were garnished with mustard or sauerkraut, or both. In 1929 journalist H.L. Mencken called for more creativity. “The hot dog should be elevated to the level of an art form,” he said. Little did he know how prescient he would be.
The simple hot dog and bun have become a canvas for regional specialties. New York and Chicago switched to the all-beef variety early in the 20th century, a trend driven by growing numbers of Jewish immigrants, whose faith forbids pork. While New Yorkers stuck to the classic preparation, Chicagoans innovated and made their hot dogs in a “garden on a bun” style, including pickle relish, tomatoes, and sport peppers.
In Detroit and other parts of the Midwest, the Coney is top dog—served with beanless chili traditionally made with beef heart, mustard, chopped onions, and shredded cheddar. In Los Angeles, Pink’s, the West Coast’s answer to Nathan’s, claims to have invented the chili dog in 1939. The Seattle dog is slathered with cream cheese, while in the South locals swear by the slaw dog, with coleslaw, onion, and minced chili.
Most recently, a hot debate over whether a hot dog is a sandwich has arisen, with experts weighing in on both sides. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary stated its position in 2016, declaring on its website that the hot dog is a sandwich, defined as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,” but the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council disagrees. It declared: “Limiting the hot dog’s significance by saying it’s ‘just a sandwich’ category is like calling the Dalai Lama ‘just a guy.’”
—Juan José Sánchez
The Most American Food
GERMAN SAUSAGES received some bad press once they began to be industrially produced in America in the 1860s to 1870s. In 1929 journalist H.L. Mencken called them “rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages,” or even worse, “a casing filled with the sweeping of abattoirs.”
Hot dog historian Bruce Kraig says that Americans of the late 19th century were suspicious of the frankfurters hanging in shop windows of German butchers, while the uniform factory-made hot dog seemed more American, reinforcing a sense of common identity. Even so, this homogenized hot dog also allowed for individual expression from region to region. According to Kraig: “You can argue the hot dog is the most American of foods, more so than hamburgers and apple pie.”
BOOK
Man Bites Dog: Hot Dog Culture in America
Bruce Kraig and Patty Carroll, AltaMira Press, 2014.