FOOD NEWS
Were Hot Dogs Actually Named After A Dog?
By Elizabeth Pak
Hot dogs can be traced all the way back to ancient Rome when Nero’s chef, Gaius, mixed various types of meat with spices and wheat to stuff inside the intestine of a pig. While we might be familiar with the name now, there’s an interesting history on how this food gained the famous name of “hot dog.”
After the hot dog’s invention, it made its way across Europe and was finally perfected in Germany. When German immigrants made their way to America in the 1800s, they brought with them many comforting recipes, including the hot dog.
It is said that a German immigrant first sold hot dogs from a food cart in New York in the 1860s, naming them “dachshund sausages,” in connection with the dog breed. The name led New York Times sports cartoonist Tad Dorgon to draw an image of a barking dachshund sausage and call it a “hot dog,” because he didn’t know how to spell the original name.