The Fascinating History of Hot Dogs

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Hot Dogs will be on my grill this 4th of July, but where did they come from? And can you put ketchup on them?

Early American immigration created an interesting mix of influences from around the world that affected our culture and began forming our food and culinary traditions. Although the hot dog might seem as the ultimate American meal or snack, the sausage actually finds its roots on a whole different continent. Straight off the bat, the story surrounding the history of the hot dog is contested. Indeed, it’s quite hard to pin down where exactly the savory snack that was made famous at our baseball parks and back yard grill outs came from.

The Greeks are actually the first ones credited in history for the hot dog. However, they were not the ones who invented the hot dog. They are just here to claim the credit. As I think back to my high school days, when we read Homer’s Odyssey, there is actually a line about hot dogs. Yes I know it’s actually a sausage specifically but hot dogs are sausages.

“As when a man besides a great fire has filled a sausage with fat and blood and turns it this way and that and is very eager to get it quickly roasted. . .”

So, that’s a start. Or at least, we’re talking about sausages now. Food historians deem this mention in Homer’s Odyssey as the very first mention of something that resembles a hot dog. The mention is somewhere around the 9th century B.C., placing the initiation of the hot dog at about 3000 years ago.

The Germans described the hot dog in a new way that would eventually end up what we know today. The first frankfurter was developed, you guessed it, in Frankfurt, Germany. The city celebrated the 500th birthday of the sausage in 1987. The frankfurter sausage would also be referred to as Wienerwurst. The first part of that word, wiener, is believed to be a reference to Vienna, Germany. The term Wienerwurst is therefore literally translated as the Vienna sausage. I know, but stick with me here...

Staying with the Germans, the first actual references that inspired the contemporary term hot dog start to appear around the 1690s. A German butcher by the name of Johann Georghehner started to promote his dachshund sausages. The literal translation is “badger dog”. So indeed, dachshund sausages are a reference to the dog that is known in the English language as the sausage dog.

But okay, just a sausage with maybe some sauce is of course not a hot dog. So who invented the hot dog?

Here it really becomes an open battlefield. A lot of German immigrants were trying to sell their European food to people of the new world America, making the history a bit hard to trace down. So really anyone can make a claim on selling the first hot dog, either as a restaurant food or as a street food. According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (yes, it’s a real thing), it is certain that German immigrants brought the hot dog to the United states. Although German immigrants already appeared to have sold the popular sausage with sauerkraut, legend has it that the first actual hot dog was inspired by the wife of a German immigrant who was a sausage vendor in the streets of St. Louis in Missouri. It was quite inconvenient to eat as a street food so his wife suggested that he put the sausages in a split bun, so that’s what he did and the hot dog was born.

What is a hot dog without its bright yellow mustard, green relish, some sport peppers, and celery salt? Hot dog connoisseurs know you can’t put ketchup on your dog (The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council disapproves of using ketchup on hot dogs.)

The problem with putting a sugary condiment like Ketchup on a hot dog is it can mask the meaty flavor of the hot dog. The result might be a taste that's not so appealing to some. For a die-hard hot dog lover, masking the flavor of the frank is simply unacceptable. Don’t tell any one, but I put ketchup on my dogs.