I am back again, and semi promising to keep to a regular schedule. No excuses, but my wife got me a new guitar and that has kept me from the keyboard once or twice.
So we got burgers and fries sorted out, now it's time to nail that other pillar of fast food, the hot dog.
First a little about the names these guys have. Frankfurters, or franks, are sausages from Frankfurt, Germany, and only bear a passing resemblance to hot dogs in that, yes, they are a sausage on a bun, but they are really much heartier and courser in texture. Wieners hail from Austria and are a blend of meats, usually pork and beef and resemble hot dogs a lot more.
No real point in time can be traced to the actual first hot dog, but we can be damn sure they came from Germany or Austria and that immigrants from these countries to America began selling them sometime around the mid 1800's. The sausage selling was easy for the German newcomers of the time. It was an easy food, widely known back home and seemed to strike a chord with American consumers whose pace of life and long work days often left little time for home cooking if you lived in any of the urban centers then. Trouble was, the hot dog vendors didn't put the stupid things in a bun yet. So diners had to burn their fingers. Some entrepreneurs handed out gloves (ya gotta wonder how they made a living) so customers would be safe. Other German immigrants like Charles Feltman tried selling them IN A BUN. Imagine.
Big picture was he did OK. Still it wasn't the 20th century yet and most folk didn't commonly call them hot dogs. It wasn't until the late 1990's that the term crept into usage. People were still a little leery of what meat actually went into these little wieners.
And on that note, yes hot dogs are made mainly from mechanically separated meat. (chicken, turkey, beef and pork. The industrial term for this process, as if it doesn't sound detached enough, is advanced meat recovery. Jesus.
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