A hot dog (frankfurter, frank, wiener, weenie) is a moist sausage of soft, even texture and flavor, often made from advanced meat recovery or meat slurry. Most types are fully cooked, cured or smoked. It is often placed hot in a special purpose soft, sliced hot dog bun. It may be garnished with mustard, ketchup, onion, mayonnaise, relish, cheese, chili orsauerkraut. The flavor can be similar to a range of meat products from bland bologna to spicy German bockwurst varieties. Kosher or Halal hot dogs may be made from beef, chicken or turkey. Vegetarian hot dogs made from meat analogue are available.
Claims about the invention of the hot dog are difficult to assess because various stories assert the creation of the sausage, the placing of the sausage (or another kind of sausage) on bread or a bun as finger food, the popularization of the existing dish, or the application of the name “hot dog” to a sausage and bun combination.
The word frankfurter comes from Frankfurt, Germany, where sausages in a bun originated, similar to hot dogs, but made of pork; wiener refers to Vienna, Austria, whose German name is “Wien”, home to a sausage made of a mixture of pork and beef (cf. Hamburger, whose name also derives from a German-speaking city). In German speaking countries, except Austria, hot dog sausages are calledWiener or Wiener Würstchen (Würstchen means “little sausage”). In Swiss German, it is called Wienerli, while in Austria the terms Frankfurter or Frankfurter Würstel are used.
Others have supposedly invented the hot dog. The idea of a hot dog on a bun is ascribed to the wife of a German named Antonoine Feuchtwanger, who sold hot dogs on the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, in 1880, because his customers kept taking the white gloves handed to them for eating without burning their hands. Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger, a Bavarian sausage seller, is said to have served sausages in rolls at the World’s Fair – either the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago or the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis– again allegedly because the white gloves he gave to customers so that they could eat his hot sausages in comfort began to disappear as souvenirs.
The term “dog” has been used as a synonym for sausage since 1884 and accusations that sausage makers used dog meat date to at least 1845.
According to a myth, the use of the complete phrase “hot dog” in reference to sausage was coined by the newspaper cartoonist Thomas Aloysius “TAD” Dorgan around 1900 in a cartoon recording the sale of hot dogs during a New York Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds. However, TAD’s earliest usage of “hot dog” was not in reference to a baseball game at the Polo Grounds, but to a bicycle race at Madison Square Garden, in the The New York Evening Journal [December 12, 1906], by which time the term “hot dog” in reference to sausage was already in use. In addition, no copy of the apocryphal cartoon has ever been found.
The earliest usage of hot dog in clear reference to sausage found by Barry Popik appeared in the 28 September 1893 The Knoxville Journal.
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