But it occurred to me that in the relentless quest for cheap, vulgar humor — I tell you, what some people will do, it’s an outrage — we have neglected an important part of our history, and one of the most recognizable icons of the United States of America, i.e., where do hot dogs come from?
OK, fine, it’s not quite as major as the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, but it’s important.
The short answer is that no one knows for sure. Hot dog historians agree on very little.
Obviously, the easy answer is Germany — given the centuries of bratwurst, knackwurst, weisswurst and so on. People in Frankfurt claim that they are responsible for the best of the wurst including the first, which they say they cranked out in 1487.
“Just look at the name,” they say, “frankfurter,” to which people in Vienna say, “Oh, hah! Ever heard of the name ‘wiener’?” they ask, dripping with sarcasm. It just so happens that “Wien” is the Austrian word for Vienna, thus the name “wiener,” which they claim they invented long before that frankfurter thing. We’ll let them fight it out, but how did the hot dog-frankfurter-wiener make to the USA?
Almost all roads lead to Brooklyn and America’s first real amusement park, Steeplechase Park at Coney Island.
In 1871, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman opened a hot dog stand in Coney Island, arguably America’s first.
Feltman called his dogs “dachshunds,” for obvious reasons, which was also their nickname in Germany. In his first year, he sold 3,684 of the hot dog-frankfurter- wiener-dachshunds.
