For many Americans, it wouldn’t be the Fourth of July without a celebratory cookout, complete with burgers and hot dogs. Of course, it’s not just on Independence Day that Americans eat this quintessential summertime food—according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, an estimated 7 billion hot dogs are consumed between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Yet the hot dog, like so many other classic “American” foods, wouldn’t be such a ubiquitous cookout staple without the cultural melting pot of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The precise origins of the hot dog aren’t entirely clear, but most food historians agree that it can be traced back to Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Germany. After all, hot dogs are also known as “frankfurters,” a reference to the German city of Frankfurt-am-Main, though it’s more likely that the immigrants who brought the hot dog to America were from the region around Frankfurt, not necessarily the city itself.
The predecessors of today’s hot dogs first appeared in New York City in the mid-1800s, with sausages sold in sandwich carts to busy urbanites who appreciated these fast, affordable meals. However, it was one particular type of German sausage—the frankfurter—that really took hold in the United States.
Much of the hot dog’s popularity is due to the efforts of Brooklyn baker Charles Feltman, who developed an early version of the hot dog bun and began selling hot dogs from a converted pie cart on Coney Island in 1867, later opening a restaurant and resort there. By the 1920s, Feltman’s Ocean Pavilion was selling around 40,000 hot dogs per day.
With regional variations in cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee, hot dogs had become firmly entrenched in American cuisine (and baseball culture) by the late 19th century. They were originally known as “red hots” (a term still used in some areas), though “hot dog” gradually became the preferred name. As with the origins of the food itself, this term is something of an etymological mystery. Sausages had been nicknamed “dogs” in the 1800s, perhaps referring to the questionable meats inside the casing, and the term “hot dog” was beginning to gain traction in the 1880s and 1890s.
Hot diggity dog!
- Now synonymous with summertime, Coney Island, and July 4th, Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs was founded in 1916 by Nathan Handwerker, a bun-slicer who had originally worked for Feltman’s.
- The Nation’s Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest has been held annually on July 4 since 1972. In 2025, the winners were Joey Chestnut, who ate 70.5 hot dogs in the men’s contest, and Miki Sudo, who ate 33 hot dogs in the women’s contest.
- Hot dogs are the subject of an ongoing debate about whether they meet the definition of a sandwich. According to Merriam-Webster, they are sandwiches, though the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council and competitive hot dog eating champions Joey Chestnut and Takeru Kobayashi say that they are not.
