Hot Dogs

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)
From American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes

Interesting Links

“H. L. Mencken: Culinary Chronicler of Baltimore” (Minxeats)

“H. L. Mencken as a Boy? Oh, Boy!” (Danny Heitman, Humanities)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken
• “The Declaration of Independence,” Abigail Adams
• “Immigrant Picnic,” Gregory Djanikian
• “Eating American” Sheila Hibben

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American Food Writing: An Anthology With Classic Recipes
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Women eating hot dogs at White City amusement park, Chicago, Illinois, during the 1920s. Unknown photographer. Chicago History Museum.

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“The national taste for bad food seems all the more remarkable when one recalls that the United States, more than any other country of the modern world, has been enriched by immigrant cuisines,” wrote H. L. Mencken a century ago in the pages of the Chicago Tribune. His article, under the title “Victualry as a Fine Art,” despaired of the state of American food:

Every fresh wave of newcomers has brought in new dishes, and many of them have been of the highest merit. But very few of them have been adopted by the natives, and the few have been mainly inferior. From the Italians, for example, we have got only spaghetti; it is now so American that it is to be had in cans. But spaghetti is to the Italian cuisine simply what eggs are to the Spanish: a raw material. We eat it as only those Italians eat it who are on the verge of ceasing to eat at all. Of the multitudinous ways in which it can be cooked and garnished we have learned but one, and that one is undoubtedly the worst.

“What ails our victualry, principally,” Mencken concluded, “is the depressing standardization that ails everything else American.”

Which brings us, perhaps inevitably, to the hot dog, which Mencken called “the reductio ad absurdum of American eating . . . a cartridge filled with the sweepings of the abattoirs.” He seemed to have a love-hate relationship with the frankfurter, although his more charitable feelings about them were usually tucked away from view. While he condemned the uniformity and blandness of this wholly (if not wholesome) American fare, Mencken delightedly served hot dogs on a silver platter to his goddaughter when she visited. And, likely as not, a mere mention of hot dogs would recall to him the happiness of youth:

Some time ago I read in the New York papers about the death of an Irishman* who had been esteemed and honored in life as the inventor of the hot-dog. . . . They said that he had made his epochal invention in the year 1900 or thereabout, and that it had been first marketed as consumers’ goods at the Polo Grounds.

All this made me smile in a sly way, for I devoured hot-dogs in Baltimore ’way back in 1886, and they were then very far from new-fangled. They differed from the hot-dogs of today in one detail only, and that one was hardly of statistical significance. They contained precisely the same rubbery, indigestible pseudo-sausages that millions of Americans now eat, and they leaked the same flabby, puerile mustard. Their single point of difference lay in the fact that their covers were honest German Wecke made of wheat-flour baked to crispness, and not the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster-of-Paris, flecks of bath-sponge, and atmospheric air all compact.

The name hot-dog, of course, was then still buried in the womb of time: we called them Weckers, being ignorant that the true plural of Weck was Wecke, or in one of the exceptional situations so common in German grammar, Wecken. They were on sale at the Baltimore baseball-grounds in the primeval days before even [Orioles infielder] Muggsy McGraw had come to town, and they were also sold at all picnics. In particular, I recall wolfing them at the annual picnic of F. Knapp’s Institute [a private school]. One year I got down six in a row, and suffered a considerable bellyache thereafter, which five bottles of sarsaparilla did not cure. (From Mencken’s memoir Happy Days, 1939.)

On November 1, 1929, the Friday after the Great Crash, the stock market remained closed to allow traders to “clean up” their records after the previous week’s chaos. The market reopened on Monday and continued its decline, and Wall Street announced that the exchange would close again the next day. Late that afternoon, past the screaming headlines of the front page, Mencken’s weekly column appeared as usual in the Baltimore Evening Sun. With his trademark arrogance and wit, he offered advice on how Americans might elevate hot dogs “to the level of an art form.” Often quoted and reprinted in the years since, it might well be the only lasting contribution of the Great Crash, and we reprint it here as our Story of the Week selection.

* The “Irishman” mentioned above by Mencken is concessionaire Harry Mozley Stevens, from Derby, England, who had been credited by some sources as being the originator of “hot dogs,” so called. Stevens supposedly first sold them at a Giants game at the New York Polo Grounds on a cold day in April, either in 1900 or 1901 and the following day cartoonist Tad Dorgan referred to the new offering as “hot dogs” in a now-lost illustration, and the name stuck. In the 1937 edition of The American Language, Mencken added, “The name was suggested, of course, by the folk-belief that wienies were made of dog-meat.” The attribution of the coinage to Stevens and Dorgan has since been discredited by numerous appearances of the term in print during the 1890s—and by the simple fact that in 1900–01, Dorgan was still living in San Francisco.

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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the text of Mencken’s article below.

Hot Dogs

The hot dog, as the phrase runs, seems to have come to stay. Even the gastroenterologists have given up damning it, as they have given up damning synthetic gin. I am informed by reliable spies that at their convention in Atlantic City last May they consumed huge quantities of both, and with no apparent damages to their pylorus. In such matters popular instinct is often ahead of scientific knowledge, as the history of liver eating shows so beautifully. It may be that, on some near tomorrow, the hot dog will turn out to be a prophylactic against some malady that now slays its thousands. That this will be the case with respect to gin I am willing to prophesy formally. Meanwhile, hot dog stands multiply, and millions of young Americans grow up who will cherish the same veneration for them that we, their elders, were taught to give to the saloon.

My own tastes in eating run in another direction, and so it is very rarely that I consume a hot dog. But I believe that I’d fall in line if the artists who confect and vend it only showed a bit more professional daring. What I mean may be best explained by referring to the parallel case of the sandwich. When I was a boy there were only three kinds of sandwiches in common use—the ham, the chicken and the Swiss cheese. Others, to be sure, existed, but it was only as oddities. Even the club sandwich was a rarity, and in most eating-houses it was unobtainable. The great majority of people stuck to the ham and the Swiss cheese, with the chicken for feast days and the anniversaries of historic battles. Then came the invasion of the delicatessen business by Jews, and a complete reform of the sandwich. The Jewish mind was too restless and enterprisng to be content with the old repertoire. It reached out for the novel, the dramatic, the unprecedented, as it does in all the arts. First it combined the ham sandwich and the cheese sandwich—and converted America to the combination instanter. Then it added lettuce, and after that, mayonnaise—both borrowed from the club sandwich. Then it boldly struck out into the highest fields of fancy, and presently the lowly sandwich had been completely transformed and exalted. It became, as the announcements said, “a meal in itself.” It took on complicated and astonishing forms. It drew on the whole market for materials. And it leaped in price from a nickel to a dime, to a quarter, to fifty cents, even to a dollar. I have seen sandwiches, indeed, marked as much as a dollar and a half.

The rise in price, far from hurting business, helped it vastly. The delicatessen business, once monopolized by gloomy Germans who barely made livings at it, became, in the hands of the Jewish reformers, one of the great American industries, and began to throw off millionaires. Today it is on a sound and high-toned basis, with a national association, a high-pressure executive secretary, a trade journal, and a staff of lobbyists in Washington. There are sandwich shops in New York which offer the nobility and gentry a choice of no less than 100 different sandwiches, all of them alluring and some of them downright masterpieces. And even on the lowly level of the drug-store sandwich counter the sandwich has taken on a new variety and a new dignity. No one eats plain ham and cole-slaw to set it off. At its best it is hidden between turkey, Camembert and sprigs of endive, with anchovies and Russian dressing to dress it.

What I have to suggest is that the hot dog entrepreneurs borrow a leaf from the book of the sandwich men. Let them throw off the chains of the frankfurter, for a generation or more their only stay, and go seeking novelty in the vast and brilliant domain of the German sausage. They will be astonished and enchanted, I believe, by what they find there, and their clients will be astonished and enchanted even more. For there are more different sausages in Germany than there are breakfast foods in America, and if there is a bad one among them then I have never heard of it. They run in size from little fellows so small and pale and fragile that is seems a crime to eat them to vast and formidable pieces that look like shells for heavy artillery. And they run in flavor from the most delicate to the most raucous, and in texture from that of feathers caught in a cobweb to that of linoleum, and in shape from straight cylinders to lovely kinks and curlycues. In place of the single hot dog of today there should be a variety as great as that which has come to prevail among sandwiches. There should be dogs for all appetites, all tastes, all occasions. They should come in rolls of every imaginable kind and accompanied by every sort of relish from Worcestershire sauce to chutney. The common frankfurter, with its tough roll and its smear of mustard, should be abandoned as crude and hopeless, as the old-time ham sandwich has been abandoned. The hot dog should be elevated to the level of an art form.

I call upon the Jews to work this revolution, and promise them confidently even greater success than they have found in the field of the sandwich. It is a safe and glorious business, lying wide open to anyone who chooses to venture into it. It offers immense opportunities to men of genuine imagination—opportunities not only for making money but also for Service in its best Rotarian sense. For he who improves the eating of a great people is quite as worthy of honor as he who improves their roads, their piety, their sex life or their safety. He does something that benefits every one, and the fruits of his benefaction live on long after he has passed from this life.

I believe that a chain of hot dog stands offering the novelties I suggest would pay dividends in Baltimore from the first day, and that it would soon extend from end to end of the United States. The butchers and bakers would quickly arise to the chance it offered, and in six months the American repertoire of sausages would overtake and leap ahead of the German, and more new rolls would be invented than you may now find in France. In such matters American ingenuity may be trusted completely. It is infinitely resourceful, venturesome and audacious. I myself am acquainted with sausage-makers in this town who, if the demand arose, would produce sausage of hexagonal or octagonal section, sausages with springs or music boxes in them, sausages flavored with malt and hops, sausages dyed any color in the spectrum, sausages loaded with insulin, ergosterol, anti-tetanus vaccine or green chartreuse.

Nor is there any reason to believe that the bakers would lag behind. For years their ancient art has been degenerating in America, and today the bread that they ordinarily offer is almost uneatable. But when the reformers of the sandwich went to them for aid they responded instantly with both wheat and rye breads of the highest merit. Such breads, to be sure, are not used in the manufacture of drug-store sandwiches, but they are to be found in every delicatessen store and in all of the more respectable sandwich shops.

The same bakeries that produce them could produce an immense variety of first-rate rolls, once a demand for them was heard. I believe in my scheme so thoroughly that I throw it overboard freely, eager only to make life in the United States more endurable. Soli Deo gloria! What we need in this country is a general improvement in eating. We have the best raw materials in the world, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but most of them are ruined in the process of preparing them for the table. I have wandered about for weeks without encountering a single decent meal. With precious few exceptions, the hotels of America all cook alike—and what they offer is hard to distinguish from what is offered on railway dining-cars.

Originally published in the November 4, 1929, issue of The Evening Sun [Baltimore]; collected in A Second Mencken Chrestomathy, 1944.