Hot Dog, We're On A Roll! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Salted

The word sausage comes from Old French "saussiche", which in turn comes from the Latin word "salsus" meaning "salted".

Gaius, Emperor Nero's cook, may have invented the first sausages. It was usual Roman practice to starve pigs for a few days before killing them for their meat. Gaius noticed one such pig had been fully roasted, not cleaned. When he stuck a knife into the cooked pig to see if the meat was edible, the intestines, empty from starvation, had "blown up" due to heat. Gaius is reputed to have said "I have discovered something of great importance!" He then stuffed the intestines with ground meats mixed with spices and wheat to create what was purported to be the first sausage.

Sausage making is really efficient butchery: scraps of meat, fat and blood were salted and then stuffed into intestines (another part of the animal not generally eaten). Traditionally beef, veal and pork were used. Besides salting, curing and smoking are also employed to preserve the meat. The common denominator being the casing enclosing the preserved meats. In modern times these casings have been replaced with collagen cases and synthetic casings. Some have their casings removed after cooking, some have never had casings or are cooked in a can, displacing the need for a casing.

Answer: Gloves

Antonoine Feuchtwanger, in 1880, sold hot sausages in St. Louis from a street cart. As the sausages were hot, he supplied gloves with the sausages so they could be eaten whilst hot. However people stole the gloves. Apparently his wife suggested to put the sausage in a bun. His brother in law was a baker who fashioned a longer bun to accommodate the sausage. These were called Red Hots. Some records claimed these events occurred at the St. Louis "Louisiana Purchase Exposition" in 1904. Bruce Kraig, Ph.D., hot dog historian and former Professor Emeritus at Roosevelt University in Illinois cannot verify this account, but it is plausible.
Newspaper as a sausage 'holder' is not plausible as it would stain the sausage with ink. Paper towels and aluminum foil were not possible 'holders' as they were both invented in the very early 20th century between 1907-1910.
Hot dog historians agree though, that Germans always ate their sausages with bread and given the connections to the frankfurter, the most likely, and least romantic reason why sausages were put in buns in America is that is how they were eaten in Germany. Immigration of German people into the US did the rest.

Answer: The New York Yankees bought out the Coney Island franchises to install them in their ballpark

In 1867 Charles Feltman owned a pie-wagon to deliver newly baked pies to the saloons adjacent to Coney Island's beaches. The salons asked him to make hot sandwiches. With the help of a wainwright in Brooklyn, on his cart he rigged a small stove to boil sausages and a metal bin to hold bread rolls. Sausages and bread seemed a strange combination at the time but the "sandwiches" were popular and Feltman's business was hugely successful. The hot dog as it became known later, was born.
Nathan Handwerker a Polish-Jewish immigrant, worked for Feltman in 1915. It appeared that he slept on the kitchen floor and ate (free) hot dogs to save his wages of $11 per week. Within a year he had saved $300 which allowed him to open a rival stand charging a nickel a hot dog instead of a dime. That was the beginning of "Nathan's Famous". Clara Bowtinelli, one of Handwerker's serving staff, was discovered there. She became the Clara Bow of silent movie fame - the It Girl.
Each year at the site of the first hot dog stand at Coney Island, a hot dog eating contest has been held every year since 1916.
The New York Yankees had no connection with the Coney Island hot dog makers.
The Coney Island Hot Dog is a variation of the "regular" hot dog which is topped with a savoury meat sauce and other defined toppings according to the local area. They are most popular in the mid-west. The naming strategy is thought, but not proven, to be that the dish was bought to the mid-west by Greek immigrants who passed through New York / Coney Island. At this time, early 20th century Coney Island restaurants were not allowed to call hot dogs as such, as the local authorities thought that consumers would actually be eating dog meat. It is likely that these immigrants that settled in the Mid-West knew hot dogs as Coney Islands, as they passed through New York on their way to the Mid-West.

Answer: No-one has ever been able to produce the cartoon

Tad Dorgan, a cartoonist, so the story goes, observed a vendor selling the "hot dachshund sausages" during a game at the New York Polo Grounds. Dorgan illustrated this scene with a dachshund dog residing in a bun with the caption "Get your hot dogs" as he could not spell "dachshund". No one has ever discovered or found a copy of the cartoon which is said to have given the hot dog its name.

There is doubt the cartoon ever existed. There may be some truth that "hot dachshund" was a term used before "hot dog" due to the Germanic connection between this type of dog and the shape of the sausage. Barry Popick, hot dog historian and linguist at Yale University, says the word "hot dog" began appearing in Yale magazines in the 1890s. Students began to call the wagons selling hot sausages on campus as "dog wagons" because of the low quality of the sausages rumoured to be made from dogs.

It didn't take long for the use of the word "dog" to become "hot dog." Popick found the first reference to "hot dogs" from an 1895, issue of the Yale Record quoting "contentedly munching on hot dogs."

Answer: St Louis

Chris Von der Ahe (1851-1913), was owner of both a St. Louis Bar and the St. Louis Browns major league baseball team. He introduced sausages to be sold alongside his beer concession in 1893 in the arena where the Browns played, 12 years before the New York Polo Fields' event.
(NB None of the other cities named had a major league Baseball team at the time).
In 1959, a Michigan meat packing company, capitalising on the association between ball parks and hot dogs called their frankfurter sausages "Ball Park Franks".
In 2011, 22.5 million hot dogs were consumed at MLB baseball parks during the baseball season.

Answer: True

When King George VI visited the US in May 1939, President Roosevelt invited the King and his family to his house in Hyde Park, Long Island for a picnic. Besides traditional picnic items such as ham, salad, rolls and strawberry shortcake, hot dogs were also on the menu.

There was much fuss made about this in the press as the menu was known before the event. Mrs Roosevelt stated that she had been implored to drop the picnic and if not at least the hot dogs as she said at quoted in a newspaper column, that the 'dignity of our country will be imperiled by inviting Royalty to a picnic, particularly a hot dog picnic!' Apparently the King was impressed with the hot dog and reputedly asked for seconds although this statement has not been verified.

Answer: New York - sauerkraut and melted Swiss cheese, sesame seed bun

A New York hot dog is served with steamed onions and a pale, yellow mustard.
A Kansas City hot dog consists of a frankfurter topped with sauerkraut and melted Swiss cheese. The bun is sesame seed.
It appears each region, or sometimes even city, has its own variety. Locals fiercely proclaim their variation is the best. As an outsider, and therefore less likely to be biased, a personal favourite of mine is the Cincinnati Coney, where the frankfurter is topped with a specialized local sort of chili made with chocolate and cinnamon.

Answer: Corn Dog

A hot dog sausage on a bun in New Zealand is called an American hot dog.

In the US, a corn dog (sometimes corndog) is a hot dog sausage encased in a thick cornmeal batter (usually fried) served with condiments, either mustard or ketchup. Later a stick was added for eating convenience.
Corn dogs are thought to have been invented by German Texans in the 1920s. though this claim is disputed. Corny dogs, appeared in the Texas State Fair between 1938 and 1942. In 1941 in Milwaukee, it is claimed "Pronto pups were available", and in Santa Monica in 1946, hot dogs on a stick were advertised.
In Australia, corn dogs are called Dagwood Dogs or Pluto Pups. Some places call them Dippy Dogs. Elsewhere in Australia, Dippy Dogs these are known as "Battered Savs", where a "Sav" is a Saveloy sausage. To confuse matters further, some (most) Australian hot dogs are made using Saveloys, a sausage that tastes vastly different from the traditional Frankfurter or Wiener. It contains 58% pork (and no beef), is usually boiled and has a casing. It is bright red in colour.

Answer: Octopus

A Bento box is a Japanese version of take-out. ("Bento" means "convenience"). It usually consists of cooked rice, some sort of protein (meat, fish, tofu) and cooked or pickled vegetables. The package comes in a box with enough food for one person. The box can be anything from mass produced plastic through to elaborately carved wooden lacquered boxes.

When the box contains a hot dog sausage, it is usually shaped like an octopus. The bun is absent. ("Kyaraben" are character Bento boxes where the arrangement of food resembles themes such as anime or manga.

In these arrangements it is common for rice balls to be shaped like pandas).

Answer: "Do not eat hot dogs on buns with your hands. Utensils need to be used for hot dogs on buns."

The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council insist that no hot dog should be eaten with utensils as it is street food, nor should a napkin be used when a tongue will serve the same purpose of cleaning the hands afterwards. Similarly the toppings and condiments should go on top of the sausage not between the sausage and the bun. It should take no more than five bites to finish a standard length hot dog (seven are acceptable for a foot long sausage).
The quoted hot dog etiquette rules are original wordings by the NHDSC.