Who Invented the Hot Dog?

Baseball and hot dogs. The two are so intertwined, the combination so ingrained in the collective American psyche, that most of us don’t give it a second thought. When you go to the game, of course you can get a dog and a beer. That’s just the way it is.

But why? Why a hot dog and not, for example, a ham and cheese sandwich? Or a turkey leg? Even as pizza has become the most common food in America, the hot dog remains a baseball stadium staple. In fact, the selections have only gotten better, with different varieties of sausages and condiment bars with everything you need to make it just right.

The great actor Humphrey Bogart once said, “A hot dog at the game beats roast beef at the Ritz.” But even Bogie must have wondered at some point, “Why a hot dog?”

The best way to think of a hot dog is as street food imported to America by immigrants. Much in the way that food trucks featuring Middle Eastern, Caribbean and Mexican food are popular today, German immigrants set the street food scene on fire in the 1880s by selling sausages from carts.

Like many things in American culture, it really took off at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago (the formal title was the World’s Columbian Exposition). Here’s just a sample of what got introduced to the American public at the fair in 1893.

Zippers
Elevators
Cracker Jacks
The first Ferris Wheel
Wrigley’s chewing gum
The dishwasher
Pabst Beer

It’s like the 2007 Steve Jobs iPhone announcement multiplied many times over. Among the wonders introduced in Chicago came a food that quickly became wildly popular: dachshund sausages served on a milk bun with sauerkraut.

That much is clear. What’s also clear is that German immigrants brought this dish over from their native country. It’s the perfect street food – you can eat it with one hand, it’s not messy unless you go crazy with the sauerkraut, and it goes well with a beer (a mainstay of German cuisine).

The Frankfurter From Germany

To take a quick step back even farther up the timeline, the sausage is believed to have started in Germany around the 13th century in Frankfurt. As with so many of the great foods from around the world, it probably was invented by a series of creative cooks looking to stretch small amounts of money into more food for the family.

People eventually combined the pork sausages from Frankfurt with beef, creating what is called today the “little sausage.” These types of sausages came to the New World along with German immigrants in the 19th century.

How Sausages Became Hot Dogs

This is where things get murky, likely because so many things happened at once as sausages grew in popularity following the fair in Chicago. Origin stories vary. Most seem to agree that the term “hot dog” came as a slang version of the dachshund sausage. The Major League Baseball site lists three different stories about how sausages came to be served on buns and called hot dogs.

Anton Feuchtwanger, a St. Louis butcher, started putting sausages on soft rolls because too many people did not return the gloves he loaned them to handle the hot sausages. Some credit his wife with the idea because she was tired of watching Anton lose money from the glove theft.
Charles Feltman, who started the first sausage stand on Coney Island in late 18th century, began to serve sausages on buns to make the food more convenient for customers
As for the name, some point to a 1901 cartoon from a New York Post cartoonist depicting people buying dachshund sausages at the Polo Grounds in New York City, home of the New York Giants. He couldn’t spell dachshund, the story goes, so he called them “hot dogs” instead.

How Hot Dogs Became a Ballpark Staple

While the food is definitely German, the marriage of hot dogs and the ballpark is typically credited to an English immigrant, Harry M. Stevens. According to an interview with his great-great-grandson, Nick Parsons, Stevens lived in poverty in Derby, England, before immigrating to the United States in the 1880s

Stevens first went to Ohio, working in steel mills in the town of Niles. While the job lifted him out of poverty, the biggest impact the U.S. had on Stevens was baseball. A fan of cricket in his home country, Stevens fell in love with baseball. He also noticed that people could use some food in the stands.

After first starting by selling advertising for a flyer about a team (the Columbus Clippers) handed out at the game that also contained what may have been the first scorecard. He then started to sell concessions. Eventually, as baseball became more popular, he moved to New York City. He sold steamed peanuts and ice cream at the polo grounds. Then, on Opening Day in 1901, came the fateful event that opened the door to hot dogs at the stadium.

A Cold Day Leads to Hot Dog Creation

On that Opening Day in 1901, it was too cold for people to buy ice cream. The Giants first home game that year was April 26 against the Brooklyn Superbas (the Giants won, 5-3, with Deadball Era legend Christy Mathewson on the mound). A quick check of weather history shows the high that day reached only 58 degrees, while the low dipped to 47 degrees. You can see why people didn’t want ice cream.

Stevens decided to try to sell German sausages, and fans bought them up so quickly that he ran out of the wax paper that they served the sausage in. He quickly decided to send his errand boy out to find small French rolls. Off he went into the streets of Manhattan, unknowingly playing a key role in American culinary history. He came back with the rolls, Stevens sliced them open and put the sausages inside, and called them a “dachshund sandwich.”

According to Parsons, it was this concoction that the Post cartoonist saw and turned into a cartoon, coming up with the term, “hot dog.” A classic of the stadium was born. Like many stories surrounding century-old events, some dispute the accuracy of this tale. But it’s the one that has survived through the years.

What is known is that Stevens went on to become a concession king. Completing his rags-to-riches story, Stevens eventually operated concessions for the Giants, New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers.

Famous Hot Dogs in Pop Culture

Through the years, artists, writers and marketers have made the most of the connection between baseball and hot dogs. For people of a certain age, the 1970s Chevrolet commercial campaign that features the “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet” jingle is forever burned into their memories. Here it is on YouTube if you care to join them.

Hot dogs also provide the punch line to one of the great scenes from a baseball movie. In “Field of Dreams,” reclusive writer Terrance Mann (played by James Earl Jones) answers the question, “What do you want,” with an angry rant about wanting to be left alone. He then realizes he’s just being asked what he wants from the concession stand. “Oh,” he replies, “dog and a beer.” And then, he breaks into a smile.

It’s also impossible to write about hot dogs and baseball without mentioning the Famous Racing Sausages that race at every home Milwaukee Brewers game in Miller Park. The participants represent different types of sausages, including bratwurst, Polish and Italian sausage, and chorizo. Racer No. 4 is simply Hot Dog.

Of course, the best connection between baseball and hot dogs is a personal one that involves that moment when you arrive at your seat, hot dog in hand, beverage of choice in the other, and settle into your seat as the players prepare to take the field. Hot dogs never taste as good as they do at the stadium.

But is it better than roast beef at the Ritz? For baseball fans, Bogie included, the answer is most definitely, “Yes.”