Dog Day Afternoon

Saucyman – Why do bratwurst taste so damn good with beer? Griller

Flavor.

Before going down the road, allow me to complain:

Sometime a ‘fact’ makes it into a cookbook and there is no making it go away, ever. Like the lie that cans/cartons of chicken stock are equal/superior to handmade versions is an oft-repeated piece of knowledge. Yes, lie – J’accuse, bouillon de poulet. The untruth gets repeated so often, it eventually becomes accepted as conventional wisdom. I’m going guess everyone who has two taste-buds to rub together can tell the difference between what comes from a can and what was made on the stove but it is easier to find at least two sources to say the ingredients are interchangeable than it is to make a case for why you should use your own stock.

A less egregious kitchen fable is that bratwurst are occasionally made of veal. On that expansive border where footnoting meets cutting and pasting, bratwurst is usually described as containing veal - ESPN’s Gameday Gourmet, whose cover cleverly shows a sausage skewered on football describes a bratwurst as “A mild sausage made mostly of veal and pork”. Okay, maybe they aren’t the worldwide leader in food knowledge, but I found nearly the same description in a dozen other books.

Where I couldn’t find veal listed as an ingredient on any packaging, manufacturer’s website or a books describing how to make sausage (as opposed to how to cook them). Bratwursts are not made of veal. At some point in history bratwursts, or just brats as they are known to those familiar with them, might have been made with veal, but not at this day in age. Veal is so unpopular; I’m not even sure veal is made of veal.

So, if the type of meat doesn’t account for unique taste of the bratwurst, what accounts for their deliciousness? The spices, particularly mace: Not personal protection mace (Back off or I’ll mace you), nor the medieval protection/aggression mace (Retreat or I shall be forced to lay this mace upon you) but the red lacy spice that grows on the outside of the nutmeg.

Mace, while not used prodigiously, seems to be the distinguishing flavor of the brat. The spice tastes like a combination of nutmeg and white pepper with a little allspice thrown in. The flavor is warm and warming, contrasting a cold lager or ale and it is like they were made for each other.

Well, that along with the fact fire = hot, beer = cold is often an equation that makes food coming off the grill seem especially well paired to beer.



Spoiler Alert –

Not to give away the ending, but The SF Chronicle tasted dog buns so we don’t have to and picked the Trader Joe’s buns as the winner in a taste test. For more info on the results you can read the article here.

Dog Training.

Our new friends at the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council – that is hot-dog.org, were kind enough to pass along a youtube post instructing eaters on doggy do’s and doggy don’ts. For those interested in sausage etiquette can watch below.

Who Put the Dog In?

July is National Hot Dog Month. Legislation (which is supposed to be like sausage-making in the sense you don’t want to watch the process, only savor the results) is not responsible for this designation; the US Chamber of Commerce decreed it in 1957 and July has been so since. Away from the calendar, there is actually a hot dog season, which, at least according to industry trade group, National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, runs from Memorial Day to Labor Day. During this 100-or-so-day period, US residents eat 7 billion hot dogs – about 25 per person, scarfing a 150 million on Independence Day alone – a much more reasonable ½ a dog per human rate of consumption.

What is a hot dog?

What actually gets stuffed in the casing has been a source of wonder and speculation for well over a century. For those who enjoy the light and lively prose of government and legal terms, you can visit the USDA site for an exact definition. Basically, hot dogs are sausages made of skeletal (as opposed to organ) meat--pork, beef, chicken or turkey. They are no more than 30% fat, 10% water, up to 3.5% filler (usually cereal or dried milk) and spices/salts/flavorings.*

The modern hot dog is a product of volume. According to the avuncular sausage maker Bruce Aidell, the hot dog is hard to produce on a small scale – custom machinery is required to keep the meat cool during processing and special products not readily available from local grocery stores help to form an emulsion to keep that hot dog texture like, well, like that of a hot dog. The popularity of the dog rose with industrialization – a steam powered meat chopper was in use as early as 1868. By the gilded age, sausages were being produced and distributed on a scale unseen before - portion controlled, industrially produced and marketed by brand name. By the early part of the 20th century, the hot dog was easily the single most iconic and popularly consumed food in the nation, America’s first fast food.

How did a Germanic sausage turn into a hot dog?

There are some apocryphal stories on how wieners (Wien is the German name for Vienna) and frankfurters became hot dogs. There is the belief the name was adopted from wiener dogs as that German butchers kept store dogs and pets. Another theory claims a popular cartoonist drew such a dog in a bun with the word 'hot dog' scribbled on the bottom because he couldn’t spell dachshund. Although I give thanks and praise to spell-check every day, it seems improbable someone working for a newspaper did not have the resources to look up the spelling of a word. Plus the whole thing suspiciously sounds like a family story – entertaining and somewhat fact-full but ultimately not factual.

Lexicographer, newspaperman and professional curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken used the word in print in 1903 but his research showed the first person to use the term to describe a bunned sausage with relish and mustard was a Polo Grounds (baseball) vendor. An alternate linguistic hypothesis places the birth of the phrase across the Long Island Sound at Yale where sophomores or sophomoric students implied the sausages from a vendor’s cart were of dubious provenance - calling them hot dogs and labeled patrons of sausage carts as members of the kennel club.

This view seems the most credible. While no one has ever been able to find the aforementioned newspaper cartoon, archival research found a reference of this usage in the Yale Record in 1895. The slur of mystery meat is still used against new waves of immigrants and their cuisine – who hasn’t heard someone refer to Indian or Chinese food with a snicker and meow? Over 100 years later and it still isn’t funny.

Hot dogs were a new food popularized by German immigrants, sold on massive scale by the new moneyed titans whose names Swift, Armour and Mayer are still associated with the product to this day. And hot dogs were food-democratic: cheap, served in public spaces such as municipal parks, baseball fields and the boardwalks of once exclusive resorts made accessible to urban residents by commuter rail service. This was a food that represented the changing face of America – urban, immigrant and mobile - thus open to ridicule from collegiate blue bloods.

A wiener may be a sausage, but it isn’t a hot dog until someone puts it in a bun.

Sausages have been around since Roman times, bread even longer but no one thought to throw the sausage in a piece of bread until…the 20th century? It is almost like the Atkins people traveled back in time to prevent carb consumption. The marriage of the bun and meat purportedly occurred at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, by a man named Anton Feuchtwanger. Although this story is most likely untrue, it's hard to pass up a reference to it because the name is so good. Wurst and milk-bun are more like the sandwich – people ate meat between pieces of bread long before the Earl of Sandwich was linked to the food.

Conspiracy theorists and observational “comedians” be damned, for this and other reasons; bakers kinda possess a masonry streak with certain numbers. As a professional group, they tend to like a base of 4. Some believe this number allows a rectangular oven to be used most efficiently with the end result that a lot of bready things are sold by the dozen. Butchers, on the other hand, work on a weight-based system and package 10 dogs per pound.

Culturally, Paradise is the name of the hot dog vendor the rotund Ignatius Reilly loves/hates in Confederacy of Dunces. 88% of people admit to ordering the food at sporting events, which means it is actually a few points higher; baseball is most closely associated with hot dogs. It is the food a recalcitrant Primo, played by Tony Shalhoub, offers to make in lieu of risotto in the film Big Night. Hot dogs have been occasionally called 'tube steaks', always with an ironic or nudge-nudge-wink-wink implication edge, but ZZ Top actually sings Tube Snake Boogie, which refers to something completely different than a hot dog (apparently it is a surfing lingo). Eating 59 1/2 hot dogs in a 12 minute period is the record for such things; I know the record holder's name but refuse to reward that behavior by linking to it. And on a more local level, hot dogs have been the subject of longest post put up here on Saucyman, which makes it time to go.


*Although soy protein can be used in part to make wieners, Soysages, beanwurst and tofu dogs are not hot dogs and are sometimes curiously referred to as meat analogues.

Hydration Headed Monster

Earlier this week, The US Conference of Mayors voted to stop spending municipal funds on bottled water. An analysis found that bottled water costs up 4000 times more than tap water despite the fact it comes from the same source 40% of the time. Compounding the cost of bottled water is the estimated 70 million dollars a year cities spend on disposing used bottles.

Not everyone is happy about this decision, Kevin Keane, a senior vice president of the American Beverage Association was quoted by Reuters as saying "It’s disappointing that some mayors find it more important to spend their time attacking a healthy beverage at a time when families are suffering from floods, rising food and fuel costs and threats to their homes and jobs".

Considering the enormity of the other problems cited by Mr. Keane, it seems reasonable to prudent that 1,100 mayors collectively decided to do something manageable and not pay for bottled water as they simultaneously pay to run municipal water works.

Perhaps the mayors had all purchased the recently released Bottlemania, to read on the plane as they traveled to the conference. Shortly before the book’s release Author Elizabeth Royte penned an Op-Ed for the NY Times extolling the virtues of public fountains. Ms. Royte even mentioned Portland’s lovely cast water bubblers – but as pretty as they are after watching enough dogs and less than healthy looking people drink from them, I am not sure I want to.

The backlash against bottled waters is on. Even self-bottled water - Nalgene bottles are no longer being clutched in clammy fingers of neohippies. As Polycarbonate has been linked to cancer. Besides affecting day-hikers and batik wearers – the material sometimes used to make baby bottles. Worse still for bottled water; its biggest and earliest proponent - celebrities - have begun to shun the Evian. Look for Liquid IVs, complete with Juicy Couture IV bags to take Hollywood by storm later this year. Even with bad press and bad news - the bottling industry will sell US residents a projected 9.4 million gallons of water in 2008, an increase of 6.7% over 2008.

But not is all well for the tap - Trace amounts of drugs than are not removed by osmosis, chlorination or filtration are conveyed by tap water. A study of Washington DC water found trace amounts of 6 kinds of drugs as well as caffeine. National tests routinely turn up synthetic birth control in water supplies – similar tests of the New York water supply found trace amounts of heart medications and tranquilizers, while San Francisco water contained a sex hormone – Just on the basis of that, San Francisco sounds like a less stressful more fun place to drink water or visit or whatever.

Thirsty? I thought so.

Next week, two new saucyposts both designed to make the reader hungry rather than ook them out - including a special feature on the bratwurst in time for holiday grilling.