Lady Lunchalot

If a New York sports cartoonist almost a century ago had known how to spell “dachsund”, the hot dog would not be called a hot dog.

Sausages are one of the oldest processed foods, with records stretching as far back as 900 B.C. Most corners of Europe had developed their regional sausage specialties by the Middle Ages, but the first true frankfurter wasn’t eaten until the late 1600s. Johann Georghehner, a German butcher, is most often credited with creating the first frankfurter. Back then, these sausages were often referred to as “dachsunds” because of their distinctive curve that looks like a dachsund dog’s posture.

Incidentally at around the same time a similar sausage recipe was being developed in Vienna, Austria. Like the German sausage, the Austrian version was named after its birthplace. Today Americans still refer to frankfurters as wieners.

German immigrants bought their dachsunds (the sausages, not the dogs) with them when they arrived in New York City and sold them on the streets from carts. However, hot dogs hadn’t yet been dressed in a bun, and roadside snackers often found the naked sausages a little too hot to handle.

Enter Arnold Feuchtwanger, an enterprising hot dog vendor at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904. He hit upon the idea of lending his customers gloves while they ate their dachsunds to prevent them from burning their fingers. It was a great idea, except his customers had the unfortunate habit of wandering off with the gloves. Luckily Feuchtwanger’s brother-in-law was a baker, so he whipped up a batch of elongated rolls, which were the perfect blanket in which to nestle a steaming dachsund.

So where does the cartoonist with bad spelling come into it all? Thomas “Tad” Dorgan, a sports cartoonist for the New York Journal was hiding from an imminent deadline at the New York Polo Grounds one chilly April day. He heard the vendors’ cries of: “Get your red hot dachsund sausages!” and a bolt of inspiration hit as he scribbled a cartoon of neat little barking sausages snuggled into their bread rolls. Unfortunately (or fortunately) Dorgan didn’t know how to spell “dachsund”. So he gave the cartoon the hasty caption, “hot dogs” instead.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 4:26 am and is filed under Food History . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.