The True Origin Of Hot Dog Buns Is Shrouded In Mystery

Hot dogs are one of the most classic American foods, a meat tube you can cook pretty much any way you can think of (boiling, grilling, air frying, even microwaving) and have it turn out okay. But one of the most interesting aspects of hot dogs is there might not be a food whose origins are more disputed or shrouded in mystery. The questions abound: were hot dogs named after an actual dog? Are hot dogs and frankfurters the same thing? And above all else: who came up with them in the first place?

But the question of where the meat came from isn't the only one whose answer is shrouded by the mists of time, because those little tubes of pork, chicken, and/or beef are only half of what makes up a hot dog. So where did hot dog buns come from, anyway? It turns out there's no clear answer, but instead, there are three competing claims for who came up with the idea of dropping a sausage in a bun for ease of use and as a vessel for toppings, all of them coming from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The first claim is the most straightforward. Harry M. Stevens was a concessioner at the Polo grounds in New York in 1901 (the stadium where the New York Giants played), and typically served his sausages in wax paper. One day he ran out, and decided to start putting them in french rolls, because he couldn't just hand hot meat to his patrons.

The second claim is similarly accidental, although it doesn't involve baseball and it's a little muddier from there. Supposedly, a German immigrant in St. Louis whose name was Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger (or maybe Antoine Feuchtwanger, or maybe just "Feuchtwanger") was selling sausages on the street and giving customers gloves to hold them — only, they weren't returning the gloves. His wife then told him maybe to use bread to save money on gloves. This story is said to have occurred in 1904 — or was it 1880? Or maybe it was 1893? The dates here are all over the place.

The third claim dates back even further. In 1867, Charles Feltman had a cart on Coney Island, New York, from which he sold sausages in buns with toppings. No cutesy, apocryphal-sounding story about a bread-based "Eureka" moment here: the guy just sold hot dogs in buns. (Considering Coney Island is synonymous with hot dogs, there might be some merit here.)

Most food historians have a hard time taking the St. Louis explanation seriously, both because it sounds too fantastical and because the dates are so variable. 1904 is definitely too late for the hot dog to have been created — the term was already showing up in newspapers in the 1890s. And the 1880s date feels like it was tacked on later to account for this fact. Ditto with Stevens in 1901; we know hot dogs in buns were around before that, so it couldn't have been him.

So, does that leave Charles Feltman as the undisputed hot dog king? Maybe not. According to hot dog historian Bruce Kraig, the most likely explanation is that there's no one recognizable inventor, and German immigrants were already putting sausages in bread or buns by the time Feltman opened his stand. 

We may never know who really invented the hot dog, but no matter who created them first, we have a lot to thank them for.