Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

10. The Chicago Hot Dog

203 N10 O The Chicago Hot Dog The words “icon” and “iconic” are easily thrown about, but if anything deserves such language it’s the hot dog. Although it has long been a symbol of American life, General Motors probably cinched the deal in 1975 when it devised the jingle, “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet, They Go Together in the Good ’Ole USA.” And nowhere is a hot dog more “iconic” than in Chicago. It’s easy to find out when the first Chevrolet appeared (1911), apple pies appear to go back to the Middle Ages, and baseball , as discussed in the previous chapter, was invented in and around Manhattan. And the hot dog? Like most of America’s favorite fast foods (pizza, “French” fries, tacos, and hamburgers ), it comes from abroad. A sign of that is the two names by which it is known: “frankfurter” and “wiener,” indicating origins in two German-speaking cities—Frankfurt am Main and Vienna (Wien).1 The hot dog is a type of sausage, and the art of sausage making is ancient, having been traced to some five thousand years ago in Sumer. Sausage is mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, and one of the characters in The Knights by Aristophanes is a sausage seller named Agoracritus, who even carries a portable kitchen (history ’s first hot dog street cart?). Historians tell us that sausage vendors sold their wares in the aisles of Greek theaters—an uncanny forerunner to ballpark hot dog vendors. In the Middle 204 The Chicago Hot Dog Ages, various cities and regions had their own varieties of sausage , such as bologna, Bavarian weisswurst, Irish blood sausage , and Thuringer from the German region of Thuringia. In Frankfurt, the story goes that in the seventeenth century, a butcher from Coburg named Johann Georghehner settled in the city, bringing his sausage recipe with him. Some sources, therefore, consider Georghehner the “inventor of the hot dog,” although the Viennese point to the “wiener” to show that the hot dog originated in their metropolis. Some German sources state that a Frankfurt butcher named Johann Georg Lahner moved to Vienna in the early nineteenth century, which means that at least some “wieners” actually originated in Frankfurt. And the Chicago hot dog? There’s no doubt: it’s a wiener. German sausages have been eaten in America since German settlers arrived in the colonial era, but the American frankfurter or wiener as it is known and eaten today dates from a later period. One myth of long standing is that the hot dog in a bun was invented at the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. As the legend tells it, a sausage vendor named Anton Feuchtwanger would lend his customers gloves so they would be able to handle his scalding sausages. Too many people walked off with the gloves, so Feuchtwanger asked his brother-in-law, a baker, to devise a roll to contain the sausages, thus creating the hot dog. A second version of the story says that Feuchtwanger began wrapping sausages in rolls in the late 1880s, and when Chris von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns, heard about it, he began selling hot dogs at his ballpark. Unfortunately, there is no evidence to support either of these tales, and the Oxford Companion to Food settles for, “All that can be said with any certainty is that in the closing decades of the 19th century frankfurters and wienies were being sold in buns in various cities in the USA.” However, Barry A. Popik, an investigator of expressions and slang, has discovered several nineteenth-century references to people eating sausage sandwiches, the earliest of which is from Charles Dickens in “The Key of the Street” (1851), where he speaks of crowds of people “clamorous for sandwiches. Ham sandwiches, beef sandwiches, German sausage sandwiches.” The Chicago Hot Dog 205 Dickens also says that “the cry is ‘mustard,’” a serendipitous addition that lets us know that the practice of slathering mustard onto hot dogs is a venerable one. An article in the Chicago News from 1890, entitled “Chicago’s Night Cooks,” quotes a street sausage vendor (apparently German) who says, “Vill de shentlemens haf some red-hots und brod?” which is especially interesting not only because it’s another indication of the pairing of hot dogs and bread but also because one might easily think that the term “hot dog” for...