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The Origin of the Hot Dog Sausage

The sausage, it seems, has always been a popular food for mankind. It was a favourite fare back in the time of the Romans, and it certainly was a treat to King George VI of England (1895 - 1952) who ate his first hot dog in 1939 at a picnic organised by the Roosevelts in Hyde Park2.
At the time, sausages were associated with a Roman festival called Lupercalian. The Lupercalian Festival was celebrated on 14 and 15 February and was the predecessor of the modern-day Valentine's Day. It included a sexual initiation rite, so it is hardly surprising that, when Catholicism arose and Constantine the Great embraced Christianity in 325 AD, he completely banned sausage consumption.
The sausage was not seen again publicly until the 15th Century, when the Germans in Frankfurt developed the frankfurter - thick, soft, fatty sausages that Constantine would have hated. However the modern type of sausage only came into existence in the 1690s. It was created by a German butcher named Johann Georghehner, who subsequently went to Frankfurt to promote this new food.
German immigrants brought frankfurters with them to the US in the 1860s, where they were sold with milk rolls and sauerkraut from a push cart in New York City's Bowery. It was there that the frankfurter would evolve into the hot dog that we all know today.

How the Frankfurter Acquired a Bun
In 1880, a German named Antonoine Feuchtwanger was peddling hot sausages in the streets of St Louis, Missouri. His sausage business was not going well, and because the sausages were piping hot, he felt obliged to provide a white glove with each purchase so that customers' hands and fingers would not get burned. This, of course, did nothing to raise his profits. His more practical wife suggested that he cut costs by putting the sausages in a split bun, which his baker brother-in-law dutifully supplied in the form of long soft rolls that fitted the shape of the meat.
Despite HL Mencken's derogatory description of them as 'same rubber, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby mustard', these hot dogs (called 'red hots') did extremely well in the American society. Visitors who went to the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago consumed massive quantities of them and, in the same year, these red hots became the standard fare at baseball parks3, and would continue to do so until today.

Hot Dogs?

Nobody is entirely certain where the term hot dog originated. It is said that in 1902 a sport's cartoonist by the name of Tad Dorgan was at a Giants baseball game, desperate for ideas as his deadline approached, when he heard concessionaire Harry M Stevens cry out, 'They're red hot! Get your hot dachshund sausages while they're red hot!' Inspiration struck, and he hastily drew a cartoon of barking dachshund sausages nestled warmly in rolls. However, his spelling was fairly poor, a problem he solved by simply writing 'hot dogs'! Alas, this cartoon has never been found.

Other sources credit Adolf Gehring as the inventor of the term hot dog. According to this legend, Gehring, a food and drink vendor at a St Louis ball game, had run out of ware and was forced to visit a baker to buy bread, as well as the butcher for sausages and wieners. The baker had only long dinner rolls, which the desperate Gehring bought. Having cooked the meat on a portable wood stove, he started making his rounds in the park. One man apparently hollered, 'Give me one of those damn hot dogs', and soon practically everybody else in the crowd were calling out for hot dogs.

Of course, these stories are apocryphal, and we may never know the truth. But does it matter? Somewhere, somehow, someone thought of the name, and thanks to them the hot dog today refers not to a canine in heat4, or one that has been stuck on a spit, but a fat, juicy sausage nestled in a bun with mustard, ketchup and sauerkraut, that even the King of England was not too proud to enjoy.