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.