Hot Dog

Two of the sausage's names are also two cities. A frankfurter is from Frankfurt am Main, where a thin smoked pork link called the Frankfurter Würstchen has been made for centuries. A wiener is from Wien, the German name for Vienna, where the recipe picked up beef and a finer grind. The American hot dog descends from both, the emulsified pork-and-beef link that German butchers carried across the Atlantic and sold off carts, and almost everything that came after happened to the bread and the toppings rather than to the sausage. The link itself is the oldest thing in the sandwich and the part that has changed least.

The defining detail is the casing, and you hear it before you taste it. A traditional frankfurter is stuffed into natural sheep casing, the thinnest of the animal casings, which firms in the cooking into a taut skin around a soft emulsified interior. Bite through it and it gives all at once with an audible snap, and the break releases the steam and fat held inside. A skinless dog is built in a cellulose casing that is stripped off after cooking, so the surface is bare and yielding with no resistance at all. Both are hot dogs. Only one answers back when you bite it, and the people who chase that snap are chasing the casing, not the meat.

Each layer fails in its own direction, which is why the cheap ones go wrong in predictable ways. Overheat the link and the casing splits lengthwise on the grill and bleeds its juice into the fire before it reaches the bun. Pick a bun with too much crust and it shreds the soft sausage and fights the bite; pick one too flimsy and it goes to paste under a wet dog and a line of mustard. A natural-casing frank wants gentle heat that brings it up plump without bursting the skin, which is the whole reason the dirty-water cart simmers rather than sears. The toppings are forgiving. The sausage and the bread are not.

Cook one on a flat-top and the kitchen tells you it is ready. The link goes down in a film of its own fat and starts to talk, a low sizzle that climbs as the skin tightens and takes a few dark blistered stripes off the steel. The cut faces of the bun go on beside it and toast to a thin gold crust while the inside stays soft and cool. There is a smell of smoke and warm pork and a faint sweetness off the toasting bread. The first bite is hot through, the casing snaps, and the juice runs before the mustard and the relish even register on the tongue.

The grammar of ordering one is regional and strict, and the rules are mostly about what goes on top. A New York street dog comes off a steam cart, dirty-water plump, with brown mustard and either sauerkraut or a sweet red onion relish. A Chicago dog is dragged through the garden on a poppy-seed bun and never sees ketchup. A Coney is split, griddled, and buried under a fine all-meat chili, raw onion, and a stripe of yellow mustard. A half-smoke in Washington is a coarser, smokier, spicier link in its own right. The sausage barely changes from city to city; the dressing is where each town signs its name.

The close cousins separate cleanly once you look at the cooking. The corn dog is the same frankfurter dipped in cornmeal batter and deep-fried, so its bread is poured on and set in the oil rather than added cold. The bratwurst and the Polish kielbasa are coarse-ground fresh sausages, grilled from raw, not the fine smoked emulsion of a frankfurter. The bacon-wrapped Sonoran dog and the Tijuana street dog are hot dogs fully dressed at a border cart, the link itself unchanged. What unites the family is the soft split roll closed around a sausage; what divides it is grind, casing, and how the heat is applied.

How a German Sausage Became the American One

The link is old and the date is foggy on purpose. Frankfurt claims a frankfurter as far back as 1487 and handed the sausages out at imperial coronations; Vienna credits the butcher Johann Georg Lahner, who carried the Frankfurt recipe east around 1800 and added beef, which is why a wiener and a frankfurter are near siblings with two city names. What arrived in America in the nineteenth century was that finished sausage, sold off pushcarts by German immigrants who already served it with bread. The hot dog was not invented so much as it stepped off a boat looking for a bun.

The bun and the name are where folklore took over, and most of the famous stories do not survive checking. The tale that the sportswriter Tad Dorgan coined hot dog in a 1901 cartoon is impossible: his earliest documented use of the phrase is 1906, and no copy of the cartoon has ever been found. The phrase is older than the legend, turning up in college magazines in the 1890s, current at Yale by 1894 where dog wagons sold them at the dorms. The glove-lending vendor at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is dismissed the same way, a good story with no record behind it.

What is documented is a chain of stands. In 1871 Charles Feltman, a German baker, opened a Coney Island stand and sold 3,684 sausages in milk rolls in his first year. In 1916 one of his roll-cutters, Nathan Handwerker, opened his own place at Surf and Stillwell and undercut Feltman by selling the same frankfurter for a nickel, half the going price, an act of pricing that built Nathan's Famous and put the hot dog within reach of anyone with five cents.