We have immigrants to thank for the all-American hot dog. There’s a lot of debate as to whether the iconic street meat was first introduced in Frankfurt (which is why hot dogs are sometimes called franks) or Vienna (wieners), but it’s an undisputed fact that German immigrants brought hot dogs to the United States in the mid-19th century. What is less certain, however, is how hot dogs got their name. Sausages date back thousands of years, being first briefly mentioned in Homer’s “Odyssey” and then again during Roman Emperor Nero’s reign. By the 7th century, sausages dipped in mustard had made their way to Europe, and in the late 15th century, Germans had embraced sausages as their own.
It’s not known when Germans began calling their particular elongated sausage “dachshund sausage” or “little dog” sausage, but when approximately one million Germans immigrated to the U.S. in the 1850s, dachshund sausages began to be sold from pushcarts in lower Manhattan and Coney Island. The sausages weren’t initially served in a bread bun, and although the inventor of the hot dog bun is also shrouded in mystery, hot dogs (still not so named) were usually served in some sort of roll in the 1880s. At this point in time, Germans and dachshunds were the butt of ethnically charged jokes, and Yale University students called the pushcarts “dog wagons,” which implied that the sausages were made from dog meat. In 1895, Yale’s humor magazine, The Yale Record, mentions students contentedly munching on “hot dogs” for the first time.
A sports cartoonist may have made hot dogs popular
It was well known that in the 19th century, horse butchers in Germany also sold dog meat, and the American public wrongly thought that German immigrants hadn’t changed their diets. In 1901, New York Journal cartoonist Tad Dorgan heard vendors selling “red hot” dachshund sausages at a polo match, and he drew a cartoon of a dachshund in a long bun. Allegedly, he couldn’t spell dachshund, so he used “dog” instead. Dorgan was extraordinarily popular and created many American slang words and phrases, such as “dumbbell,” “hard-boiled,” and “for crying out loud,” but because this particular cartoon has never been found, the veracity of his coining of “hot dog” is doubted. But “hot dog” was certainly in Thomas Edison’s mind when he made a short film in 1904 titled “Dog Factory” that depicted people bringing different dog breeds to a butcher who magically transforms them into sausages.
The term “hot dog” stuck, and in 1916, Nathan Handwerker opened his Coney Island stand, selling all-beef hot dogs for a nickel, which became an immediate sensation. Despite competitors’ claims that some other kind of meat was in Handwerker’s cheap franks, Nathan’s Famous was considered to be so delicious that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt served them to King George VI of England during his visit to the U.S. in 1939. We will never know for sure how they came to be named, but today, hot dogs are still celebrated across America as an all-American staple.
