THE $19 HOT DOG has arrived. I came into this valuable news through the Wall Street Journal, which reports that they are gussying up hot dogs in New York and Los Angeles. The $19 dog is available at a joint called the Old Homestead. A Kobe beef frankfurter, it is “parboiled and served with Kobe beef chili, Cheshire cheese sauce, and Vidalia onions.” If you’re looking to cut back, you can get a mere $16 dog at the Belvedere in Beverly Hills, where the dog is made of chicken thigh meat and foie gras, served with oven-dried tomato ketchup and morel mushroom and onion relish. Demographically, this is food, clearly, for people of whom Barnum said one was born every minute. The promotion through upgrading of what is essentially working-class food for the palates of the wealthy has been around a long time. The lunch spécialité de la maison at a club I belong to is corned-beef hash with an egg on top. Cassoulet, an old French peasant dish, can be found in three-star restaurants for stratospheric prices.
Yet until now one might have thought that there would be no way to upgrade the hot dog, that “cartridge,” as H.L. Mencken once called it, “made from the sweepings of the abattoir.” Chicago, “Hog Butcher to the World,” in the words of that old bullthrower Carl Sandburg, had more and larger abattoirs than anyone else, and as a Chicagoan born and bred, I suspect that my own number of cartridges consumed has easily exceeded a thousand. The last one I bought, at a Cubs-Brewers game a couple of weeks or so ago, cost $3, which I thought high priced, but I had no choice.
Most of the hot dogs of my youth came in for around 25 cents. Fifteen cents more bought a small brown bag of fresh-cut and splendidly greasy French fries. (In those Edenic times, grease was not yet thought artery-choking but instead was considered a flavor-enhancer.) As a boy between the ages of 13 and 18, I would wolf down a hot dog at odd hours during the day or night; when my friends and I had dogs for lunch, we’d usually have two, with fries and a fine, belch-producing Pepsi-Cola.
The best hot dogs in Chicago were produced either by the Vienna or the David Berg sausage company. They were bright red, with thick skins. We ate them with yellow mustard, piccalilli, and chopped onions–never ketchup, which was considered outré. Ask in those days for Poupon mustard, and I could not have answered for the consequences. (Some people liked to add hot green peppers.) A properly steamed bun with poppy seeds was the finishing touch. I could go for one now, hold the peppers.
Every subject has its connoisseurship, hot dogs included. In Chicago, we never put sauerkraut on a hot dog because the kraut was felt, rightly, to compete with the flavor of the dog. The same applies to chili on a hot dog–verboten. Lettuce and tomatoes occasionally show up on Chicago hot dogs; so, too, mayonnaise, but one assumes such barbarities have been requested by bumpkins.
I once read that the Boston journalist George Frazier III used to bring his own hot dogs to Fenway Park, and pay the vendors the cost of the park’s regular dogs to put them on the grill. A nice touch, yet here the purist would argue that hot dogs oughtn’t to be grilled–again, because of the interfering taste of charcoal–but boiled, so that the rich blatant spiciness of the dogs emerges to the highest power.
The grilled sausages of my youth were Polish sausages served with French’s Mustard and fried onions. I remember the powerfully tantalizing smell of them on Sunday morning visits to Maxwell Street, Chicago’s oldest and most exotic flea market, which contained Gypsy fortune-tellers and black men who knew more Yiddish than a lot of Reform rabbis now under 40. I occasionally eat a Polish sausage sandwich at a ballgame, if I am in a death-defying or suicidal mood. They seemed slightly dangerous even when I was a kid; in those days we referred to them as polio sausages. Like so much that is not good for you, they are delicious.
The combination of vanity and the lust for health has reduced my intake of hot dogs radically. I may now eat fewer than 10 a year. Hot dog stands are still endemic in Chicago; not half the man I used to be, I drive by them without looking sideways.
Along with the difficulty that hot dogs present to the health-minded, along with the attack on them in the form of gentrification by dopey upscale restaurants, hot dogs now have something of an image problem. “Hot-dogging” has come to mean showing off; to be a “hot dog” is to be someone deliberately outrageous. Better, I suppose, to be a hot dog than a turkey (a hopelessly inelegant loser), but still bad enough.
The old hot dog is on its way to becoming an endangered species. What, as Lenin asked in another context, is to be done? Grab a dog for lunch, my advice is, and tell them, please, hold the foie gras.
–Joseph Epstein
