Hot Dog; for us, more than one meaning!

Leaving aside the delicious fried eggs of the previous post, this time we will speak about one of the most typical fast food which is consumed everywhere nowadays.

Yes!! We are referring to the Hot Dog!! It is a sausage served in a sliced bun and commonly garnished with mustard, ketchup, onions, mayonnaise, and so on.

Its origin is difficult to know, as, before the hot dog became so famous, sausages were still placed in some types of bread or bun like a finger food, but it is believed to be from United States.

The special thing about the hot dog is that the normal sausage used to prepare it comes from the German term “Frankfurter”, most known as Frankfurt sausage.

This sausage is differently composed depending on the country; on the one hand, we have the “Wiener” or “Vienna sausage”, a variation of the Frankfurt one which mixes pork and beef, and which is known in Austria, North America and other countries as if it was the real Frankfurter sausage. On the other hand, however, we have the original Frankfurter sausage, native from the city of Frankfurt, and whose composition is only pork. This last is the one used in Germany and Switzerland to prepare hot dogs.

Despite of the different kinds of sausages, the hot dog is always a hot dog, here and there, but there’re some places where this term is used in a totally different way from its “American” meaning. One of them is, for example, New Zealand, where the concept “hot dog” makes reference to the “battered sausages”, something quite distinct from hot dogs as the sausage here is not served in a bun but it’s dipped in batter and served with chips.

Something curious is that, though we know the concept by its whole composition (the sausage in bread with condiments); it really makes reference only to the sausage! “Hot”, of course, is related to the temperature of this, and “dog” to the many accusations which pointed to dog as the kind of meat used in the sausages belonging to the 19th century period. This fact appeared in many newspapers and the term became as common as it is nowadays. This is the main hypothesis about why this food is called so and about the cause of the analogy between the dachshund (a breed of dog whose body is very long) and sausages. Ted Dorgan represented this analogy in his cartoons.

As we can normally see, hot dogs are fully recognized all over the world and they use to be commercialized at street portable stands known as “hot dog carts”. They are normally sold in high congregation areas too, as the baseball stadiums in the U.S. are.

Bit by bit their marketing through portable stands has become more typical and there is a massive commercialization in certain urban areas of the world, coming into existence very popular streets.

A food that you are most likely to have tasted, and if not, I encourage you to do it! It's worthy!

HOPE YOU ENJOYED!!