Hot Dog

The term "hot dog" was coined in 1902 during a Giants baseball game at the New York Polo grounds. On a cold April day, concessionaire Harry Mozley Stevens from Ohio was losing money trying to sell ice cream and ice-cold sodas. He sent his salesmen out to buy up all the wiener/frankfurter sausages they could find, and an equal number of rolls. In less than an hour, his vendors were hawking these sausages in a bun from portable hot water tanks while yelling, "They're red hot! Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot!" They called them dachshund sausages because they felt the wiener/frankfurter sausage looked like a dachshund. It is said that the famous cartoonist T A Dorgan (Tad) recorded these odd new things in a cartoon in the New York Journal, drawing them as dachshunds in buns, and called them hot dogs because he couldn’t spell frankfurter. Unfortunately for Stevens, at first, many people believed that the hot dog really contained dog meat. Eventually people realized otherwise, and the hot dog became one of the most popular foods in the United States.