In almost every kitchen in the world you can find different types of sausages. From our black pudding, butifarra, chistorra, fuet or chorizo ​​to the Vienna or Toulouse sausage, the American bologna, the Slovak kranjska klobasa or the Polish cabanossi.
Frankfurt sausage, with a protected demographic designation of origin since 1860, is the one originally used for hot dogs. In Germany it is known as “dachshund sausage”, a fundamental fact when it comes to understanding the history.
In 1852, the Frankfurt butchers’ guild created a smoked sausage rich in spices, stuffed into a thin, transparent casing, which was given the name of the city: Frankfurter.
In Germany, as part of an urban legend, they say that the inventor of the Frankfurter was inspired by the dachshound dog of a German butcher friend of his -very popular in Frankfurt-, so the sausage was attached to that specialized dog in badger hunting.
Time later, the name of dachshound sausage was consolidated, it was sold as such in butcher shops and served in restaurants and food stalls in Germany and Austria, competing with the usual whitish, thick, soft and fatty sausages.
The Frankfurter sausage arrived in the United States and it didn’t take long for it to be called in various ways: franks, for short, wieners or Viennese, red hotsy or dachshound.
Who was in charge of bringing the hot dog to the frenzy of American popularity was a New York sandwich and soft drink vendor named Harry Stevens. This gentleman was the one who obtained one of the few who had obtained an exclusive license to sell food prepared during the celebration of American football and baseball games in New York, around the year 1906.
Thus, during the games this season Stevens became a popular figure as he walked through the stands hawking his merchandise shouting: “Order your hot dog.”
Starting in the summer of that year, a cartoonist for the Hearst newspaper chain named Ted Dorgan, who was watching a baseball game in New York, noticed the hot dog vendor, his shouts to offer the product and the name of the hot dogs. sausages, and quickly designed the first sketch of the product: a dachshound puppy inside a mustard-smeared bun.
What made this drawing particular was that instead of writing the word dachshound, he simply wrote at the bottom of the drawing: Get your hot dog. The little cartoon, distributed by the associated press, was amusing, and in this way the name became general, making this German sausage become one of the best-known dishes in American cuisine.
