Are Hot Dogs German? The Sausage Says Yes

Short answer first, since you are probably here mid-argument with someone at a barbecue. On the one hand, yes, the sausage comes from German-speaking Europe. But on the other, the bun, ballpark, and competitive-eating theatrics are all American. A hot dog is what happens when a German sausage emigrates and picks up an accent. I went looking for this after a cooking show set my brain off, and the hot dog was the first raise its stubby little head. It's also the cleanest case in the whole German-American food story, which makes it a good place to start. So, are hot dogs German? It depends what you mean by "hot dog." If you mean the sausage, the lineage runs straight back to German-speaking Europe. Frankfurters and wieners are tied to Frankfurt and Vienna, even if the exact origin is disputed. If you mean the whole assembled thing, the sausage in a bun you eat standing up at a fair, that part is American. The Germans brought the sausage. America built the delivery system around it. That distinction is the equalizer for any arguments about it. When you boil it down, it's really two people using two different definitions of the same word. Frankfurter or wiener? Frankfurt and Vienna both want the credit The frankfurter, named after Frankfurt. The naming is a regional turf war. A frankfurter takes its name from Frankfurt, which has claimed the sausage since at least the late 1400s. A wiener takes its name from Wien, the German name for Vienna, which insists it got there first. There is even a rival story that a butcher in Coburg cooked up the modern version in the late 1600s. Nobody is going to settle this, and very few seem particularly bothered either way. What matters for our purposes is that every one of those claims is German-speaking. Wherever exactly it began, it began over there, not over here. How a German sausage became a New York street food The American chapter opens in the mid-1800s, on the streets of New York, with German immigrants selling sausages from pushcarts. People called them dachshund sausages, partly for the long low shape and partly as a running joke about what might be inside. Germans had been eating sausage with bread for a very long time, so this was less an invention than a change of address. Hot frankfurter cart in New York, 1934, back when the hot dog still advertised its German name. The leap to something recognisably modern usually gets pinned on Charles Feltman, a German butcher who set up on Coney Island in 1871 and sold his sausages tucked into rolls. A few decades later one of his own former employees, Nathan Handwerker, opened a rival stand nearby and undercut him on price. That is how Coney Island became the spiritual home of the American hot dog. Two German immigrants, one beach, and an enormous amount of mustard. Where the bun and the name came from The bun went mainstream late in the 19th century, and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago helped put hot dogs in front of vast crowds. From there they took over the baseball stadium, and the hot dog stopped being known as immigrant food and became the most American lunch imaginable. By the time it reached the ballpark, the German sausage had become the most American lunch going. Photo: Ryan Denis, CC BY-SA 4.0 The name has its own myth attached. You will sometimes hear that a cartoonist coined "hot dog" after sketching a dachshund in a bun because he could not spell frankfurter. Lovely story, but almost certainly false. The term was already circulating by the 1890s, most likely as a wink at the long-running suspicion that cheap sausages contained actual dog. The cartoon came later and helped the name spread, then somehow got remembered as having invented it, which is very much in the spirit of the overall hot dog history. What this has to do with the rest of your barbeque Here is the part worth remembering. The hot dog is not a one-off. It's the most famous member of a much larger group of foods that arrived with German immigrants and slowly shed their accent. Even the burger patty has a German relative, the Frikadelle. The potato salad, the sauerkraut, the cold lager, all German. I summarized all of it in German influence on American food, and the hot dog is simply the one that hides in plain sight best. If you have ever wondered why schnitzel tastes oddly familiar to an American palate, it's because the food arrived here a long time ago. It just dropped the German accent and picked up a twang along the way. A quick personal note I have a toddler who would happily eat sausage in a bun for every meal if the rules allowed it, and I started telling him where it comes from. He doesn't care (yet). And that's fine. I'm leaving a breadcrumb he might follow back one day when someone tells him hot dogs are American and a small voice says, "...well, sort of." That's the whole reason I find this worth writing down in the first place. A hot dog is a good story hiding in a paper napkin.

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Are Hot Dogs German? The Sausage Says Yes

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