Hot dog Period BOrigin theory BVerified

The hot dog is a sausage tucked into a long, soft bun, a snack that took shape in the United States and is most closely tied to New York. It settled into place as street food between the late 19th century and the early 20th, and that window is where the scholarship puts its emergence.

Its parts were all old-world staples. The wheat bun belongs to a long European tradition of baked bread, and the pork or beef sausage carries on the German-speaking world's craft of the casing and the smokehouse. The sausages that lend their names to the dish, the frankfurter from Frankfurt and the wiener from Vienna, came to American cities with German immigrants in the 19th century, along with the smoking and stuffing skills that made them.

In the growing cities those sausages found their setting: the street cart, the ballpark, the amusement park, the crowds of ordinary urban life. Cheap, quick, and eaten on the move, the sausage-in-a-roll took hold in the rhythm of the city. No single person invented it. The hot dog rose out of an immigrant food culture carried along by the traffic of the American street.

The hot dog's beginnings come with several stories, each fitted out with a name and a date. Charles Feltman opened the first hot dog stand on Coney Island in 1867 or 1871. Feuchtwanger of St. Louis invented the bun. A single panel by the cartoonist Tad Dorgan gave the world the name 'hot dog.' They are specific, and being specific, they are easy to tell.

The food historian Bruce Kraig (Hot Dog: A Global History, 2009) took them apart one by one. No contemporary record backs up Feltman's stand; the bun was already known before Feuchtwanger and cannot fairly be called his invention; and the Dorgan naming story does not even line up in time.

The Dorgan story was finished off by a later work devoted to the phrase itself, Origin of the Term Hot Dog by Gerald Cohen, Barry Popik, and David Shulman (2004). Dorgan did not arrive in the United States until 1903, his first hot dog cartoon appeared in December 1906, and its subject was a bicycle race, not baseball. All of this is well after 1884, the year the phrase first appears in print. Cohen offered a two-hundred-dollar reward to anyone who could produce the supposed baseball cartoon. No one came forward.

The same study also retraced how the name spread. 'Hot dog' first surfaces in September 1884, in a newspaper in Evansville, Indiana, meaning sausage meat. The finished form, the sausage in a bun, appears in December 1892 in a Paterson, New Jersey paper, served with mustard and popular with the crowd. As slang for a dandy or a showoff, it turns up in 1894 and 1895 in the humor magazines of Yale and Michigan. It was campus slang, built on a 19th-century urban legend that the sausages might contain dog meat.

Once each named inventor and birthplace has been let go, what is left is an image reached by elimination. Kraig puts it plainly: there was no single inventor, and German immigrants were already tucking sausages into bread before Feltman. That German immigrants brought the sausage and that it gradually took root as street food in the 19th-century American city is solid. But the question of who sold the first hot dog stays open and does not close. Past the stories that credit one man, what remains is the conclusion that the question has no answer.