National Hot Dog Day

What the day is

National Hot Dog Day is kept in mid-July, in the middle of the grilling season and of a month the sausage industry promotes as hot dog month. Exact dates vary between calendars, since the observance is trade-promoted rather than official.

Origin and background

The sausage is German. Frankfurt and Vienna both claim the ancestor, which is why the words frankfurter and wiener both attach to it, and German immigrants brought it to American cities in the nineteenth century. What happened next was American: the bun, the cart, and the association with baseball parks and street vendors turned it into cheap hot food eaten standing up.

The name's origin is murkier than the usual story suggests. The popular account credits a cartoonist who could not spell dachshund, but no such cartoon has ever been produced, and the term appears in print earlier, in college slang, where it carried a joke about what might actually be in the sausage.

The regional versions are where the real argument lives. Chicago style is a poppy seed bun with yellow mustard, relish, onion, tomato, pickle spear, sport peppers and celery salt, and ketchup is treated as a provocation. New York carts serve them with sauerkraut and onion sauce. Detroit and Cincinnati put chili on them. Sonoran hot dogs are wrapped in bacon and loaded with beans and salsa.

The competitive eating contest held every July 4 on Coney Island has, fairly or not, become the most televised thing about the food.

How to take part

• Steam or simmer the buns. Warm soft buns are the single biggest difference between a good hot dog and a mediocre one.
• Score the sausages lightly if grilling, which stops them splitting and gives the char somewhere to catch.
• Do not boil them hard. A gentle simmer keeps them plump; a rolling boil splits the casing and leaches flavor.
• Build a regional version you have never eaten rather than defaulting to mustard and ketchup.
• Buy natural casing if you can find it. The snap is the point.