24 Feb /16

Hot Dog

Hot Dog – Word of the day - EVS Translations
Hot Dog – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Most people believe that the hot dog originated in the United States. And while, in fact, that is where it really got its popularity as a working class street food, the hot dog was actually imported from Germany.

And while next year the German city of Frankfurt will celebrate the 530th birthday of the hot dog, the story behind the sausage in a ban is still quite boiling.

Sausage is one of the oldest forms of processed food, with the first written evidences coming from 9th century B.C., from the ancient Greek tale of adventure, the Homer’s Odyssey.

Yet the real predecessor of the hot dog sausage, the frankfurter packed in a tin casing was firstly produced in only 1852 – by a butcher in Frankfurt, of course.

Logically, the German immigrants brought their sausages with them to America with records showing that in the 1860s the first German sausages, along with milk rolls and sauerkraut were sold as street foot. At that time the sausage was popular with its German name, the dachshund sausage (attributed to its shape).

There are several stories as who was the first to serve the sausage in a bun, though there are no doubts that it was a German. The two most plausible stories attribute the invention to either Charles Feltman – a baker, who opened up the first Coney Island hot dog stand in Brooklyn and around the late 1860s was offering sausages on a bun or a German peddler named Antonoine Feichtwagen – who in the 1880s came with the idea to put a sausage in a split bun and sell it in the streets of Missouri.

In any case, the practical innovation to keep the customers from not burning their hands while eating the hot sausage came to be and the hot dog was born.

And now when comes to its name, whether as a pun or logic – consumption of dog meat was fairly common in Germany and the term dog has been used in the States as a synonym for sausage since the 1880s, though the jokes about dog meat and sausage been many decades older than this. The earliest written uses of hot dog in reference to sausage come from the 1890s, from different US magazines and newspapers.

A written record from the 1893 confirms both the origin of the name and also how spread out and common hot dogs were by that time. 31 December 1892, Paterson (NJ) Daily Press: “Somehow or other a frankfurter and a roll seem to go right to the spot where the void is felt the most. The small boy has got on such familiar terms with this sort of lunch that he now refers to it as “hot dog.” “Hey, Mister, give me a hot dog quick,” was the startling order that a rosy-cheeked gamin hurled at the man as a Press reporter stood close by last night. The “hot dog” was quickly inserted in a gash in a roll, a dash of mustard also splashed on to the “dog” with a piece of flat whittled stick, and the order was fulfilled”.

At the same time, the term hot dog came to name show-off people who give a flamboyant display of themselves and their style and skills. It first appears in 1894 in the sense of a well-dressed college student, a clothes horse. From the University of Michigan’s Wrinkle of 18 October 1894: A Suit of Clothes, great wonders wrought. Two Greeks a “hot dog” freshman sought. The Clothes they found, their favor bought.”