Distinctive Street Food: The Story of New York City’s Hot Dog

Hot dogs, the “dachshund sausages,” as they were initially called because they were thin and long like the eponymous breed of dog, were first sold with sauerkraut in the 1860s from street pushcarts in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhoods around St. Mark’s Place.

At the time, the area was called Klein Deutschland (Little Germany) where immigrants from Germany, Austria, and Ukraine lived. Later, when the large Ruppert Knickerbocker brewery was built on a lot between 91st and 92nd Streets on Upper East Side Third Avenue (now known as Yorkville), it was nicknamed “Germantown” because German immigrant cooks and brewers moved up to that area.

Many built much smaller breweries and established German eateries, patisseries, and wurst purveyors, dominating East 86th Street, which was the heart of Germantown. The Kleine Konditorei was present on East 86th Street until 1997, and there are still a few German delis and restaurants in that neighborhood.

In 1871, a 15-year-old German immigrant named Charles Feltman opened the first hot dog stand in Coney Island. In his first year of business, he sold 3,684 dachshund sausages in a milk roll slathered with mustard.

The better known Coney Island hot dog emporium, Nathan’s, is a relative newcomer. Nathan’s Famous began as a nickel hot dog stand in Coney Island in 1916. It was established by a husband and wife team, Nathan and Ida Handwerker, who used Ida’s grandmother’s spice recipe that still gives the Nathan’s hot dogs their distinctive taste.

There is also a kosher version of a hot dog under the Hebrew National brand.

There are numerous hot dog brands sold in New York City, but Sabrett, Boar’s Head, Nathan’s, and Hebrew National are ubiquitous, even though the headquarters of these companies are no longer located in NY State. Nowadays, in the USA, we eat over 20 billion hot dogs made by a number of producers throughout the country. That’s about 70 hot dogs per person per year!

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, anything that’s sold as a hot dog or frankfurter must be a sausage in a casing that’s cooked and/or smoked. Today, however, there are also “skinless hot dogs” on the market. Though pork is one of the most frequent ingredients, you can also get all beef (for the kosher or kosher-style), chicken, or turkey hot dogs. Or you can get ones that combine pork and beef or meat and poultry.

Sausage is one of the oldest forms of processed food, having been mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey as far back as the Ninth Century BCE.

Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany is traditionally credited as originating the hot dog, which is still known to much of the English-speaking world as a “frankfurter” shortened to “frank.”

However, this claim about Frankfurt is disputed by researchers who say that the sausage was created in the late 1600s by Johann Georghehner, a butcher in the town of Coburg, Germany. According to them, Georghehner traveled to nearby Frankfurt to sell his sausages in volume, and that became the connection between Frankfurt and the hot dog.

The Viennese point to the term “wiener,” also used as a name for the hot dog, to prove their claim that the birthplace of the hot dog was actually Vienna (Wien), not Frankfurt.

As it turns out, it’s more likely that the North American hot dog was a thinner variant of the bratwurst that was widely available in both Germany and Austria and then brought to the U.S. by immigrant butchers from Central Europe.

When I first came to New York in 1967, boiled hot dogs on a roll with mustard and sauerkraut or onion sauce and relish were sold from ubiquitous stainless steel pushcarts at every corner throughout the city, as well as in storefronts and coffee shops.

The Sabrett pushcarts with their distinctive umbrella, now almost 4,000 of them, have been a quintessential New York City sight for decades. The ones sold from these carts are known to the locals as “dirty water” hot dogs.

Hot dog-selling storefronts and coffee shops mostly sell grilled hot dogs, cooked on a metal flattop or on a machine with rollers that turns the meat as it cooks. Another option used in home kitchens was the “hot dog zapper” that cooked the sausages by “electrocuting” them with 110 volt electric current. I used to own one for a number of years, and it made two great hot dogs every time I needed a snack!

When I first arrived in Manhattan, the price for the street-food version varied from 75¢ for the “dirty water” Sabrett franks from a pushcart at a street corner to as low as 2 hot dogs for $1 in a number of storefronts. But those were sold in the bun with only mustard. If you wanted sauerkraut or onion sauce, it was an extra nickel.

In Little Italy, where my first New York City apartment was located, fast food was even cheaper – 40¢ for a hot dog on a roll with mustard and sauerkraut, 25¢ for a plain slice of pizza (the pepperoni slice was 35¢), and 10¢ for a mug of coffee with milk.

Today, you can purchase Sabrett, Nathan’s, or Hebrew National hot dogs, as well as other good brands, in most supermarkets. Many also sell the needed condiments and bread: sauerkraut, mustard, onion sauce, and buns. Now that I no longer live or work in Manhattan, I do miss the “dirty water” hot dogs from the pushcarts!