The decline of the sausage preceded that of the Roman Empire. According to the oldest known Roman cookbook, written in A.D. 228, sausage was a favorite dish at the annual pagan festival Lupercalia, held February 15 in honor of the pastoral god Lupercus. The celebration included sexual initiation rites, and some writers have suggested that sausage served as more than just a food. The early Catholic Church is known to have outlawed the Lupercalia and made eating sausage a sin. And when Constantine the Great, the fourth-century emperor of Rome, embraced Christianity, he, too, banned sausage consumption. As would happen in the twentieth century with liquor prohibition, the Roman populace indulged in “bootlegged” sausage to such an extent that officials, conceding the ban was unenforceable, eventually repealed it.
The evolution of the broad sausage to a slender hot dog began during the Middle Ages. Butchers’ guilds in various European city-states coveted regional sausage formulas, producing their own distinctive shapes, thicknesses, and brands, with names denoting the places of origin. Wiener wurst— “Vienna sausage” —eventually gave birth to the German-American terms “wiener” and “wienie.”
Shape and size were not the only distinguishing national features to emerge. Mediterranean countries specialized in hard, dry sausages that would not spoil in warm weather. In Scotland, oatmeal, a common and copious food, became one of the earliest cereal fillers for sausage, starting a practice that then, as now, made pork or beef all too often a secondary ingredient. In Germany, sausages were thick, soft, and fatty, and it was in that country that the “frank” was born in the 1850s.
In 1852, the butchers’ guild in Frankfurt introduced a sausage that was spiced, smoked, and packed in a thin, almost transparent casing. Following tradition, the butchers dubbed their creation “frankfurter,” after their hometown. The butchers also gave their new, streamlined sausage a slightly curved shape. German folklore claims this was done at the coaxing of a butcher who owned a pet dachshund that was much loved in the town. He is supposed to have convinced co-workers that a dachshund-shaped sausage would win the hearts of Frankfurters.
Three facts are indisputable: the frankfurter originated in the 1850s, in the German city from which it derived its name; it possessed a curved shape; and it was alternatively known as a “dachshund sausage,” a name that trailed it to America.
In America, the frankfurter would also become known as the hot dog, today its worldwide name.
Two immigrants from Frankfurt, Germany, are credited with independently introducing the sausage to America in the 1880s: Antoine Feuchtwanger, who settled in St. Louis, Missouri; and Charles Feltman, a baker who sold pies from a pushcart along Coney Island’s rustic dirt trails. It was Feltman who would become an integral part of the hot dog’s history.
In the early 1890s, when Coney Island inns began to serve a variety of hot dishes, Feltman’s pie business suffered from the competition. Friends advised him to sell hot sandwiches, but his small pie wagon could not accommodate a variety of foods and cooking equipment. Instead, the pieman decided to specialize in one hot sandwich, his hometown’s sausage, the frankfurter.
Installing a small charcoal stove in his pushcart, Feltman boiled the sausages in a kettle and advertised them as “frankfurter sandwiches,” which he served with the traditional German toppings of mustard and sauerkraut. The sandwiches’ success enabled Charles Feltman to open his own Coney Island restaurant, Feltman’s German Beer Garden, and the amusement resort became identified with the frankfurter. With business booming, in 1913 Feltman hired a young man, Nathan Handwerker, as a roll slicer and part-time delivery boy, for eleven dollars a week. The move would open a new chapter in the hot dog’s unfolding history.
Nathan’s Franks. By 1913, Coney Island was a plush resort and an important entertainment center. Two avid frankfurter eaters along the beach-front were a local singing waiter named Eddie Cantor and his prominent-profiled accompanist, Jimmy Durante. Both worked for little money and resented the fact that the prospering Charles Feltman had raised the price of his “franks” to a dime. The struggling vaudevillians suggested to Nathan Handwerker that instead of working for Feltman, he go into competition with him, selling franks for half the price.
In 1916, Nathan did just that. With savings of three hundred dollars, he purchased an open-front Coney Island concession on the corner of Surf and Stillwell avenues and introduced the nickel frank, using a spiced meat formula devised by his wife, Ida. And to promote his product, Nathan employed a clever stratagem. He offered doctors at nearby Coney Island Hospital free franks if they would eat them at his stand wearing their professional whites and with stethoscopes prominently displayed. Doctors, then unassailably revered, proved an advertisement for the quality and salubriousness of Nathan’s franks that—together with the nickel price—almost sank the competition. To assist in serving the steady stream of customers, Nathan hired a perky, redheaded teenager, Clara Bowtinelli, who did not last long. A talent agent who frequented the concession took an interest in her, shortened her surname to Bow, and she was headed to Hollywood to become the glamorous “It Girl” of silent films.
Hot dog and hamburger, today American specialities, have German roots.
“Hot Dog”. In 1906, slender, streamlined sausages were still something of a novelty in America, and they went by a variety of names: frankfurters, franks, wieners, red hots, and dachshund sausages. By this time, a refreshments concessionaire, Harry Stevens, had already made the sausage a familiar food at New York City baseball games. At the Polo Grounds—the home of the New York Giants—Stevens’s vendors worked the bleachers, bellowing, “Get your red-hot dachshund sausages!”
In the stands one summer day in 1906 was a syndicated Hearst newspaper cartoonist, Tad Dorgan. The dog-like curve of the frank and the vendors’ “barking” call inspired Dorgan to sketch a cartoon of a real dachshund, smeared with mustard, sandwiched in a bun. As the story is told, back at his office, Dorgan refined the cartoon, and unable to spell “dachshund,” he settled on “dog,” captioning the picture “Get your hot dogs!”
The name not only stuck, it virtually obsoleted its predecessors. And it quickly spawned a string of neologisms: the exclamatory approval “hot dog!”; the more emphatic “hot diggity dog!”; the abbreviated “hot diggity!” which inspired the song lyrics “Hot diggity, dog diggity, zoom what you do to me”; the noun for a daredevil, “hot dogger”; and the verb for going fast or making tracks, “to hot dog,” which decades later became a surfing term.
It was the universal acceptance of the term “hot dog” that caused the world to regard the frank or wiener as a thoroughly American invention. And America fast became the major producer of hot dogs: today 16.5 billion are turned out each year, or about seventy-five hot dogs for each man, woman, and child in the country.
The man responsible for the term “hot dog,” Thomas Aloysius Dorgan, who signed his illustrations TAD, was a major American cartoonist. There have been retrospectives of his work, and several cartoon museums around the country feature Dorgan collections. Historians, archivists, and curators of cartoon museums generally credit Dorgan with originating “hot dog,” but their numerous searches to date have not produced the verifying cartoon.
Hamburger: Middle Ages, Asia
The hamburger has its origin in a medieval culinary practice popular among warring Mongolian and Turkic tribes known as Tartars: low-quality, tough meat from Asian cattle grazing on the Russian steppes was shredded to make it more palatable and digestible. As the violent Tartars derived their name from the infernal abyss, Tartarus, of Greek mythology, they in turn gave their name to the phrase “catch a tartar,” meaning to attack a superior opponent, and to the shredded raw meat dish, tartar steak, known popularly today by its French appellation, steak tartare.
Tartar steak was not yet a gourmet dish of capers and raw egg when Russian Tartars introduced it into Germany sometime before the fourteenth century. The Germans simply flavored shredded low-grade beef with regional spices, and both
cooked and raw it became a standard meal among the poorer classes. In the seaport town of Hamburg, it acquired the name “Hamburg steak.”
The Hamburg specialty left Germany by two routes and acquired different names and means of preparation at its points of arrival.
It traveled to England, where a nineteenth-century food reformer and physician, Dr. J. H. Salisbury, advocated shredding all foods prior to eating them to increase their digestibility. Salisbury particularly believed in the health benefits of beef three times a day, washed down by hot water. Thus, steak, regardless of its quality, was shredded by the physician’s faddist followers and the Hamburg steak became Salisbury steak, served on a plate, not in a bun.
In the 1880s, the Hamburg steak traveled with a wave of German immigrants to America, where it acquired the name “hamburger steak,” then merely “hamburger.” Exactly when and why the patty was put in a bun is unknown. But when served at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, it was already a sandwich, with its name further abbreviated to “hamburg.” And some three decades before McDonald’s golden arch would become the gateway to hamburger Mecca, the chain of White Castle outlets popularized the Tartar legacy.
Sandwich: 1760, England
The sandwich, as well as the Sandwich Islands (now the Hawaiian Islands), were named for a notorious eighteenth-century gambler, John Montagu, fourth earl of Sandwich, and British first lord of the Admiralty for the duration of the American Revolution.
Montagu’s tenure of office was characterized by graft, bribery, and mis-management, and his personal life, too, was less than exemplary. Although married, he kept a mistress, Margaret Reay, by whom he had four children. Because of his high military rank, when English explorer Captain James Cook discovered the Hawaiian archipelago, the islands were named in the earl’s honor.
An inveterate gambler, Montagu refused to leave the gaming tables even for meals. In 1762, when he was forty-four years old and the country’s foreign secretary, he spent twenty-four straight hours gambling, ordering sliced meats and cheeses served to him between pieces of bread. The repast, which enabled him to eat with one hand and gamble with the other, had for some time been his playing trademark, and that notorious episode established it as the “sandwich.”
Montagu’s sandwich was not the first food served between slices of bread. The Romans in the pre-Christian era enjoyed a light repast that they called an offula, which was a sandwich-like snack between meals. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Romans ate food between slices of bread; they were master bread bakers in the ancient world. A typical Roman loaf of bread, weighing one pound, was shaped into a mound and cooked in either of two ways: atop the stove, as panis artopicius, “pan bread”; or baked in an earthenware vessel, as panis testustis, “pot bread.” Historians in the second century B.C. pointedly observed that Roman women deplored ovens and left the baking of bread to freed slaves.
Bread itself originated with the Egyptians about 2600 B.C., when bakers made a momentous discovery. If they did not immediately bake a grain-and-water recipe called gruel, but first let it ferment, the resultant product was a higher, lighter bread. With this discovery of leavening, Egyptian bakers expanded their skills to include more than fifty different loaves, including whole wheat and sourdough breads.
Centuries later, the Westphalian Germans would create a variation on sour rye bread and pejoratively name it pumpernickel, from pumpern, “to break wind,” and Nickel, “Old Nick the devil.” The earliest instance of “pumpernickel” in print appeared in 1756 in A Grand Tour of Germany, by a travel writer named Nugent. He reported that the Westphalian loaf “is of the very coarsest kind, ill baked, and as black as a coal, for they never sift their flour.” The sour rye bread was considered so difficult to digest that it was said to make even Satan break wind.
Melba Toast: 1892, London
The opera singer who gave her stage name to a dry, brittle crisp of toast—and to a dessert—was born Helen Porter Mitchell in 1861 in Melbourne, Australia. Adapting the name of her hometown, the coloratura soprano introduced it as her stage name in 1887 when she performed as Gilda in Verdi’s Rigoletto at Brussels. By the 1890s, Nellie Melba was adored by opera lovers around the world and worshiped by French chef Auguste Escoffier.
In 1892, Melba was staying at London’s Savoy Hotel, where Escoffier reigned as head chef. After attending her Covent Garden performance as Elsa in Wagner’s Lohengrin, he was inspired to create a dish for the diva, who regularly dined at the Savoy. Sculpting from a block of ice the wings of a swan, and coating them with iced sugar, he filled the center with vanilla ice cream topped with peaches. The dish was to recall the opera’s famous scene in which Lohengrin, knight of the Holy Grail, arrives to meet Elsa in a boat pulled by a swan, singing, “Nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan” (“Only you to thank, my beloved swan”).
Chef Escoffier initially called his creation peches au cygne, “swan peaches.” Later, on the occasion of the opening of London’s Carlton Hotel, he improved on the dessert by adding raspberry sauce, and renamed it Peach Melba. The soprano, always weight conscious, breakfasted at the Savoy on tea and dry toasted bread as thin as Escoffier could slice it. Thus, her name came to represent both a low-calorie diet crisp and a decidedly nondietary dessert.
Ketchup: 300 B.C., Rome
Though we think of ketchup as strictly a tomato-based sauce, it was defined for centuries as any seasoned sauce of puree consistency and was one of civilization’s earliest condiments. First prepared by the Romans in 300 B.C., it consisted of vinegar, oil, pepper, and a paste of dried anchovies, and was called liquamen. The Romans used the sauce to enhance the flavor of fish and fowl, and several towns were renowned for their condiment factories. Among the ruins of Pompeii were small jars bearing an inscription translated as: “Best strained liquamen. From the factory of Umbricus Agathopus.”
Though the Roman puree is the oldest “ketchup” on record, it is not the direct antecedent of our modern recipe. In 1690, the Chinese developed a tangy sauce, also for fish and fowl. A brine of pickled fish, shellfish, and spices, it was named ke-tsiap, and its popularity spread to the Malay archipelago, where it was called kechap.
Early in the eighteenth century, British seamen discovered the natives of Singapore and Malaysia using kechap and brought samples of the puree back to their homeland. English chefs attempted to duplicate the condiment, but, unfamiliar with its Eastern spices, they were forced to make substitutions such as mushrooms, walnuts, and cucumbers. Mistakenly spelled “ketchup,” the puree became an English favorite, and a popular 1748 cookbook, Housekeeper’s Pocketbook, by a Mrs. Harrison, cautions the homemaker “never to be without the condiment.” It was so popular in England that Charles Dickens, in Barnaby Rudge, smacked his lips over “lamb chops breaded with plenty of ketchup,” and Lord Byron praised the puree in his poem “Beppo.”
When and where did tomatoes enter ketchup?
Around 1790, in New England.
It could not have been much earlier, because prior to that decade, colonists suspected the tomato of being as poisonous as its botanical relatives deadly nightshade and belladonna. Although the Aztecs had cultivated the tomato (technically a berry and a fruit), calling it tamatl, and the Spaniards had sampled it as a tomate, early botanists correctly recognized it as a member of the family Solanaceae, which includes several poisonous plants (but also the potato and the eggplant). The Italians (who would later make the tomato an indispensable part of their cuisine) called it mala insana, “unhealthy apple,” and food authorities can only conclude that many peoples, unfamiliar with the plant, ate not its large red berries but its leaves, which are toxic.
In America, Thomas Jefferson, one of the first in the United States to cultivate the tomato, is credited with exonerating and legitimizing the fruit. One of the earliest recipes for “tomata catsup” appeared in the 1792 The New Art of Cookery, by Richard Brigg. And though acceptance of the tomato and its ketchup was slow, by the mid-1800s the fruit and its puree were kitche
n staples. A popular cookbook of the day, Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management, counseled housewives: “This flavoring ingredient is one of the most useful sauces to the experienced cook, and no trouble should be spared in its preparation.”
But preparation of homemade ketchup was time-consuming. Tomatoes had to be parboiled and peeled, and the puree had to be continually stirred. It is little wonder that in 1876, homemakers eagerly purchased America’s first mass-produced, bottled ketchup, from the factory of German-American chef and businessman Henry Heinz. Heinz Tomato Catsup, billed as “Blessed relief for Mother and the other women in the household!” was an immediate success in its wide-base, thin-neck, cork-sealed bottle, and both the bottle design and the ingredients in the puree have hardly changed in over a hundred years.
Following the success of ketchup, Henry Heinz produced a variety of pickles, relishes, fruit butters, and horseradishes. But his company as yet had no identifiable slogan. In the early 1890s, while riding in a New York City elevated subway car, Heinz spotted a sign above a local store: “21 Styles of Shoes.” In a moment of inspiration, he reworked the phrase, upped the number, and created what would become one of the most famous numerical slogans in advertising: “57 Varieties.” At that time, the company actually produced sixty-five different products; Henry Heinz simply liked the way the number 57 looked in print.
Worcestershire Sauce. In the mid-1800s, British nobleman Sir Marcus Sandys returned to his native England from service in India as governor of the province of Bengal. A noted epicure, Sandys had acquired a recipe for a tangy sauce, a secret blend of spices and seasonings which was doused liberally on many Indian dishes.
From his estate in Worcester, England, Sandys commissioned two chemists, John Lea and William Perrins, to prepare bottles of the sauce for private use in his household and as gifts for friends. Its popularity prompted Lea and Perrins, with Sandys’s permission, to manufacture it under the name “Worcester Sauce.” It debuted in America, though, as “Worcestershire Sauce,” shire being the British equivalent to county, and Worcestershire being the county seat of Worcester. Americans took readily to the condiment, if not to the pronunciation of its name.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 53