The Hot Dog comes to the United States

 

What would later be called a hot dog, was a type of sausage that had been made since 1852 in various European countries, mainly Germany and Austria, long before European emigrants brought it to the United States where several European butchers dedicated their lives. to replicate the sausage in the new continent.

The Dashound sausage arrived in the United States at the end of the 19th century and was known under various names: Franks (short for Frankfurt), Wieners or Viennese or Red hotsy and became a very popular street food among the poor or middle class.

In New York, it made its way, apparently thanks to the German butcher Charles Feltman, who was the first to sell those European sausages in carts on the beaches of Coney Island, near New York, in 1867. The sales success he had He made his “cart” gradually gain in size and finally other waiters joined to work on it.

For those migrants who worked so hard, that was the quintessential sandwich. A soft, spongy bun, capable of quickly absorbing the juices of the freshly roasted sausage and the mustard that wrapped it, ready to be gobbled down while holding on with one hand and doing anything.

As it happens now, in those days it was sold wrapped in a kind of elongated napkin that prevented the sauce from dripping on clothes, and since it was served hot, it began to be called a hot dog, due to its similarity with the breed of dog that fed it.

However, the real person responsible for taking the newly created Hot Dog to the heights of success was a New York sandwich and soft drink vendor named Harry Stevens, who had obtained an exclusive license to sell prepared food during the celebration of American football games and baseball in New York, circa 1906.

Stevens walked through the stands of the stadiums hawking his merchandise shouting “They're red hot! Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot!”  and one day in the summer of that year a cartoonist for the Hearst newspaper chain named Ted Dorgan who was at a game noticed that vendor and his sausages and designed quickly the first sketch of the product: A dachshound puppy inside a mustard-smeared bun.

As Ted was not able at that time to spell the word dachshound (name of the sausage) he limited himself to writing at the bottom of the drawing: Get your hot dog and the cartoon, distributed by the associated press, was funny and that way it became general name. The HOT DOG was born to the public.

That product became so popular that everyone began to make and sell sausages inside a bun, which meant an enormous variety of shapes, sizes, thickness and even the sauces that accompanied them, so it was necessary to determine the characteristics that should fulfill the product to be called that way: Hot Dog would be called the long bun seasoned with mustard sauce, whose sausage measured exactly fifteen and a quarter centimeters long by two and a half centimeters in diameter, wrapped in mustard, which would be the inseparable companion of this gastronomic succulence.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, this type of fast food spread throughout the United States due to its sale in baseball, soccer and other sports fields, where large numbers of people eager to eat something congregated.

Later, in Chicago, the German immigrant Oscar Mayer begins to sell the first commercial brand of sausages and in Santa Anita, Los Angeles, the brothers Dick and Mac McDonald opened a hot dog cart that over time - and the money obtained - became the now famous McDonald's fast food chain.

In the beginning, hot dogs were offered to the public in portable street carts with the capacity to keep the sausages warm for a while, although in the Anglo-Saxon world (USA and UK) they also began to be sold in so-called "greasy spoons" that were not more than places where fast food was sold.

Currently the Hot Dog is a food that can be consumed practically anywhere in the world, there being streets famous for its sale in more than one city.

They can be found in multiple and dissimilar places ranging from restaurants to street stalls, through service stands for parties and events, such as our "Coge Tu HotDog Aquí"