Corn Dog Day

What the day is

Corn Dog Day is observed on March 22. The corn dog is a sausage on a stick coated in cornmeal batter and deep fried, and it is a solved engineering problem more than a recipe.

Origin and background

Several claims exist for its invention, mostly clustering around American state fairs in the 1930s and 1940s, with competing accounts from Texas and Minnesota and no clear resolution. What is not disputed is the setting: it was designed as food to be eaten while walking, which explains every feature of it. The stick is a handle, the coating is a sealed container, and nothing requires cutlery.

The batter is the interesting part. Cornmeal contains no gluten, so a batter built on it does not develop the elastic network that makes a wheat coating tough and chewy, and it fries into something crisp and short that fractures cleanly. Most recipes combine cornmeal with a proportion of wheat flour anyway, because pure cornmeal has nothing to bind it and slides off, so the wheat supplies just enough structure to hold the coating to the sausage.

Getting it to stick at all is the practical problem. A sausage straight from the packet is wet, and batter will not adhere to a wet surface, so it must be dried thoroughly and usually dusted with flour first, giving the batter something to grip. The batter is traditionally held in a tall narrow vessel so the whole thing can be dipped in one movement.

The frying follows the rules covered on the fritter entry in December: oil around 350 to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, so the moisture in the batter flashes to steam and drives oil out rather than letting it soak in.

How to take part

• Dry the sausages thoroughly and dust with flour before dipping.
• Use a tall glass for the batter so one dip coats the whole thing.
• Keep the oil temperature up and fry in small batches.
• Let them drain on a rack rather than on paper.
• Eat standing up, which is what the design assumes.