Get Your Red-Hot History Lesson! How the Hot Dog Rose From Coney Island Carts to Platters at Presidential Picnics

It was hardly a typical state dinner. On June 11, 1939, George VI of England attended a picnic retreat at President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s residence in Hyde Park, New York, the place the king, for the primary time in his life, tasted a scorching canine. The treats arrived on silver platters. After sprucing off his first canine, the king went again for a second, and Washington, D.C.’s Times-Herald celebrated this expression of Anglo-American solidarity: “At this time we are able to bellow down the Coney Island boardwalk, our voices uplifted in delight, that the new canine really makes the entire world kin.”

The new canine’s nice success has at all times transcended class, wrapping the trendy historical past of america into a conveyable bun. All of it started with the 5 million German immigrants who arrived in two massive waves from 1830 to 1890, throughout one of many Industrial Revolution’s intervals of fast urbanization. The primary scorching canine, then referred to as frankfurters or wienerwursts, possible emerged within the mid-Nineteenth century, when German immigrants began promoting bun-wrapped sausages from pushcarts with coal-fed fireboxes in New York Metropolis’s Bowery. These simmered or steamed sausages had that particular Previous World snap: finely floor pork or beef stuffed into pure casing that popped with the primary chunk, a sensation that scorching canine purists nonetheless search. Moveable and tantalizingly cheap, these road eats had been designed for teeming cityscapes. 

By the 1870s, greater than 25,000 weekend guests flocked to sunny seashores, hand-carved carousels and vaudeville performers on Coney Island’s sandy paths and, later, boardwalks. Within the subsequent decade, as factories and mills joined banks and shops in providing staff a half-holiday on Saturdays, increasingly people got here to benefit from the seaside on weekends—and so they required low cost eats. It was on the boardwalk that the new canine started to safe its spot on the American menu. Charles Feltman, a baker and street-cart vendor, is broadly credited with popularizing the sausage-in-a-bun method. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, higher often known as the World’s Truthful, launched hundreds of thousands to this useful deal with, and by the top of the century, scorching canine distributors had been bustling about racing tracks and America’s beloved baseball fields.

Whereas there’s heated debate over the origins of the identify, and although dachshunds are sometimes invoked, historian Bruce Kraig argues persuasively that it’s truly a results of the sausages’ reputation among the many youth. “Scorching canine” was already slang for a swaggering younger man who loitered with different flashy dandies round public amusements and devoured up sausages from distributors. The slang unfold, and by the point Nathan Handwerker, Feltman’s Coney Island protégé, began Nathan’s Well-known in 1916, “scorching canine” was ubiquitous.   

By the turmoil of the Thirties, the new canine conjured the sense of a easy however satisfying life which may lie inside attain, even amid the Nice Despair. On February 10, 1931, national papers printed Walt Mason’s ode to the “Lowly Life,” wherein the columnist declared in verse, “I discover life much more scrumptious in my humble scorching canine stand. / For the boys in lofty locations stir resentment in every single place; / Somebody longs to punch their faces, somebody yearns to tug their hair.”

The new canine additionally nourished American beliefs amid the patriotic fervor of World Battle II. In November 1941, a reporter for the Detroit Free Press marveled on the wiener’s journey. “The new canine might have an extended Teutonic ancestry, however from White Home to hovel he’s a totally naturalized American now with out a single Nazi sympathy.”

Postwar prosperity meant carnivorous Individuals may and did flip to different meats, and the hamburger muscled in as the brand new diner darling. But scorching canine remained on the middle of American open-air rituals, from new suburban yard barbecues to nights on the drive-in. And there was at all times baseball. A proverb coined by one of many period’s greatest film stars, Humphrey Bogart, captures an American fact: “A scorching canine on the recreation beats roast beef on the Ritz.”

The new canine has proved infinitely adaptable. As baseball traveled south of the border, the traditional ballpark canine took a visit to Hermosillo, Mexico, within the Seventies and returned a decade later because the Sonoran dog, now wrapped in bacon and buried beneath pinto beans, onions, tomatoes and jalapeños. Even the meat was not sacrosanct, with Tofu Pups and SoyBoy Not Canine broadly hitting markets early within the Nineteen Eighties for the rising health-conscious motion. Within the Nineties, Hollywood’s well-known Pink’s Hot Dogs restaurant launched topping combos based mostly on celebrities’ preferences, just like the Rosie O’Donnell (chili, mustard, onion and sauerkraut) or the Drew Barrymore (jalapeño canine, chili, mustard, onions, cheddar and three slices of bacon).  

Whereas trendy purists balk at such liberties, doubl-ing down on arguments concerning the acceptability of skinless canine and ketchup, there’s at all times a spot for the dirt-cheap scorching canine. Costco constructed an entire enterprise mannequin round that very nostalgia: Its quarter-pound, all-beef scorching canine, served with a big drink, has famously stayed inflation-proof at $1.50—although it wasn’t simple. In a 2018 interview, then-CEO Craig Jelinek recounted a showdown with the corporate’s co-founder Jim Sinegal. “I mentioned, ‘Jim, we are able to’t promote this scorching canine for a buck fifty. We’re shedding our rear ends.’” Sinegal purportedly responded that if Jelinek raised the value, “I’ll kill you. Determine it out.” They switched from Hebrew Nationwide and began making their very own Kirkland signature canine, and the issue was polished off.