The Wonderful, International Aspects of the Hot Dog

What goes into the hot dog? We're not talking about meat industry horror stories of "everything but the oink", but rather the various times and places that contributed to the hot do as we know it.

The term hot dog itself is only about a century old, and is a joke on the foodstuff's resemblance to an elongated dachshund. Before that, the terms red hot (after it's color and temperature) or frankfurter were used. The red color of most hot dogs comes not from red meat but from nitrates and nitrites, classes of chemical salts used in their preparation. Frankfurt is short for Frankfort (Germany) sausage, but in Frankfort and elsewhere it might be called a wiener, which is itself short for wiener wurst, meaning Vienna Sausage.

The word sausage itself has roots in the Latin sal for salt. Over the years, anything prepared with salt or heavily seasoned had a good chance of deriving its name from the Latin salsus (salted) or salsicius, (seasoned with salt): hence salad, sauce, salsa, and sausage all got their names. The idea of stuffing the intestines or other organs with minced meat is older than the word sausage or a lot of other things.

What about the stuff you put on your hot dog? Ketchup is of Asian origin, although the recipe has changed beyond recognition with the addition of new world tomato (from the Nahuatl tomatl). In Malay, kechap means "fish sauce", in Chinese dialects of Guangdong and Xiamen the words kéjap and ke-tsiap (respectively) can both be traced back to etymons meaning "eggplant" and "juice." You say eggplant and I say tomatl . . .

Mustard in old France was made from what we now call the mustard seed and moust, or what the Romans called vinum mustum for "new wine." Nowadays, it's made with vinegar (French vin aige meaning "sour wine") instead

Vinegar also figures prominently in sauerkraut and pickle relish (and ketchup, for that matter.) Sauerkraut is German for "sour greens". A relish is any of a number of foods named for their agreeable aftertastes: reles in Middle English means "an agreeable aftertaste", from an old French word meaning "remainder" and various Latin words meaning "something left behind." For the origins of pickle relish in specific, we go back to the German pokel, which means "pickle" but also refers to the brine in which the pickles are cured.

Brine, of course, is salty water, which brings us once again back to salt. Which, it would seem, is one of the most important ingredients in a hot dog, at least in terms of history.