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Hot dogs has evolved into an all-American favorite
As we celebrate our nation's beginnings on this Fourth of July, perhaps we should rethink the saying "as American as apple pie." Colonial Americans may have been unanimous in crowning the pastry as their cultural trademark, but statistics show that we are ready for an update.
The favored food? The hot dog.
Despite popular belief, the apple pie did not spring from American kitchens. Pies (or pyes) appeared in England as early as the 12th century. Fruit pies, including apple, gained popularity in the 1500s.
Today, 36 million Americans identify apple as their favorite type of pie, according to a survey conducted in 2006 by Crisco and the American Pie Council, making it the most popular.)
"I don't know what it is that makes them American, but I know for some it is the fabulous smell that brings back memories," says Linda Hoskins, executive director of the pie council. "And no one has a bad memory of apple pie. You can't get more American than hot dogs, baseball and apple pie."
Hot dogs, the first part of that trilogy, have a story that is truly all-American. The term "hot dog" has many rumored origins; most involve baseball and some are centered in St. Louis.
Hot dogs descend from the German sausage known as a dachshund, or "little-dog" sausage, but the type we enjoy today was indeed a product of the USA.
Dachshund sausages were brought here by German immigrants in the 1860s. They sold the sausages from pushcarts on the streets of New York, the fastest-growing city in our melting pot of a country.
The sausage's popularity is credited to Chris Von de Ahe, a German immigrant who owned the St. Louis Browns baseball team. He made them regular fare at baseball games, and in 1893, they began to catch on around the country.
In 1901, the name "hot dog" began to overtake "frankfurter," "red hot," "dachshund," "frank" and "wiener." The story goes that Tad Dorgan, a New York Journal sports cartoonist, was attending a polo match on a blustery April day when he noticed vendors selling sausages kept hot in portable water tanks. The vendors were shouting: "They're red hot! Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot!"
Dorgan quickly drew a sketch of the scene, and not knowing how to spell dachshund, he called them "hot dogs."
However, historians cannot locate the cartoon that supposedly coined the phrase. Others say the term was originated when Yale's student newspaper wrote about "dog wagons" selling hot dogs in fall 1894.
Although hot dogs were making it big, they were missing the familiar bun. At the 1904 World's Fair, Anton Feuchtwanger, a St. Louis concessionaire, provided white gloves to customers so they could hold the steamy sausages. When most of his gloves disappeared, he had the notion to place the sausages in long, split-top buns. He may have gotten the idea from Germany, where dachshund sausages were eaten with bread.
More than a century later, hot dogs are one of America's top-selling foods. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council estimates that Americans eat 20 billion each year. Last year, consumers spent more than $4.1 billion on hot dogs and sausages in U.S. supermarkets.
This holiday weekend, the hot dog council predicts that Americans will eat 155 million hot dogs. The entire month of July is recognized as National Hot Dog Month.
Source: http://www.stltoday.com/
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