I remember that in my youth I was often surprised by the name - hot dog. Like a bun, like a sausage, in a sausage, according to ours (and generally European, and also American) culinary traditions should not have any great dogs or any other dogs, and a sausage in a bun is a hot dog and that's it here?
The name surprised me only. I remember there was one colleague who stubbornly refused to call a sausage in a bun a hot dog. There were many reasons. First, patriotism. Like, there is nothing to call our sausages bourgeois hot dogs. Secondly, as he argued, the love of truth - since there are no great dogs, then a sausage and that's it. He proposed to name sausages by the name of the main ingredient for the celebration of culinary and historical justice. If you really want someone in English. Hot Chicken, for example. Or hot co... You can - hot soy.
Sellers snorted in response to his claims. Well, when we were young, we considered it boring. Because as Great Dane and Great Dane, yes, I wonder why Great Dane, but what about the name to dig?
And then I decided to look for some information about why hot dogs are hot dogs, and not cows, for example.
There are several versions of the origin of the name. The first version is based on the fact (or myth) that a Frankfurt butcher invented the long and thin sausages that became the prototype of modern sausages. Choosing a name for them, he called these sausages t "dachshund", which means "dachshund" in German. Well, quite possible. Figures and drawings of dogs similar to dachshunds are found all over the world, and historians and zoologists agree that the breed originated in Germany. I mean, dachshunds most likely existed in those days, so a long skinny sausage could cause such associations.
Thanks to the Americans, the sausage turned from a dachshund into just a mastiff, "at the beginning of the twentieth century, a certain artist Dorgan, drawing a dish gaining popularity (a roll in a sausage). I decided to sign it using the original name dachshund. Only now he knew the translation, but how the word is written in German - no. That's why I used my native English. So a simple dachshund grew to a whole mastiff.
The second version, which seems to me to be vital, is a little simpler: buying sausages with bread (or a little later - in rolls) from hawkers (more likely to say - delivery men, so how there were mobile vans for sale), cunning American students noticed that there were always many dogs around such delivery vehicles, begging a treat. And at first the vans were nicknamed "dogs", and then the sausages were "dogs."
This version is held by the culinary historian Barry Popik.
Which option do you like best?