On the Fourth of July, Americans will eat about 150 million hot dogs. That is the single biggest hot dog day of the year, and according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, if you laid all those dogs end to end, they'd reach from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles. Not just once. Not twice. Not thrice.
Five times.
Add in the millions of burgers that could reach from Key West to Anchorage, and you have a whole lot of meat that is going on grills for hungry Americans to consume.
Hot dogs and hamburgers, the quintessential American summer food that, of course, comes from Germany.
Yep. Hot dogs and hamburgers, just like so many of us, came here on a boat. These two delicious creations arrived from Germany in the 1800s. They arrived in the recipes and the pushcarts of immigrants looking for a better life.
The food we eat to celebrate America's birthday came from somewhere else and became ours. If you wanted one story to sum up this whole country, you could do a lot worse than a couple of German sausages on the Fourth of July.
This week we are turning 250, and I can't think of a better way to mark it than to tell you where two of our most beloved foods actually came from.
So how does a German sausage become America’s favorite food?
Sausage itself is ancient. We've always been looking for ways to make meat scraps taste better, and encased meat isn't exactly a modern invention. Many of the sausages have murky origins, but we can narrow down the hot dog's origin story better than any Marvel writer could dream of.
The sausage we call a hot dog has two European hometowns, both of which would like you to know they got there first. Frankfurt, Germany gave us the word "frankfurter." Vienna, Austria (Wien, in German) gave us "wiener."
Frankfurt claims to have been making frankfurters for more than 500 years, and even threw it a 500th birthday party in 1987. Vienna points to the name wiener, and says, "not so fast, Fritz."
No one can prove which one came first, but really, who cares? Let's not get in between two proud European cities in a sausage duel. What does matter for this Dispatch is how it got to America, and on that front, everybody can agree.
German immigrants started arriving in New York in large numbers in the 1860s, and started selling sausages off pushcarts, mostly down in the Bowery, served with milk rolls and sauerkraut. Cheap, fast, easy to eat while you walk, and you did not need a restaurant to sell one. 19th century food trucks!
Those same Germans brought a whole sausage tradition with them, one a lot "wurst" than the hot dog, and it has earned its own Dispatch later this summer. Today we are chasing just this one sausage.
The most famous of those early vendors was a German immigrant named Charles Feltman, who set up on Coney Island and is generally credited with the move that turned a sausage into a hot dog: he put it in a roll. That was around 1870, give or take a few years depending on which account you trust. By the time he was done, Feltman was running a small empire of beer gardens and selling sausages by the hundreds of thousands.
Then, in a true story of American entrepreneurship, one of Feltman's employees, a young Polish immigrant named Nathan Handwerker, borrowed $300 from a couple of friends in 1916 and opened his own stand right in the neighborhood, undercutting his old boss by selling his hot dogs for a nickel when Feltman was charging a dime.
As the story goes, two singing waiters named Jimmy Durante and Eddie Cantor talked him into the nickel price because they couldn't afford a ten-cent dog on their pay. Handwerker paid back the loan in under a month. That stand was Nathan's Famous, and it is still on Coney Island today. You may have heard of it.
Gotta love the true story of an immigrant kid slicing buns for the local big shot, then quietly out-hustling him. That is a pretty American way to start a company.
And why on earth do we call it a hot dog?
You're going to love this. We have an origin story, but it's almost certainly made up. Let's share it anyway because it's a great story.
Here's the most common story: at a New York Giants (they're now the San Francisco Giants) baseball game around 1901, a cartoonist named Tad Dorgan saw vendors selling sausages. He went to draw a "dachshund sausage" in a bun, couldn't spell dachshund, and wrote "hot dog" instead. Great story.
The problem is nobody has ever found that cartoon, and the phrase shows up in print well before 1901. Three actual scholars got so deep into this that they wrote a 293-page book called "Origin of the Term 'Hot Dog'" and they trace it instead to college slang, students at places like Yale who called the sausage carts "dog wagons" as a crude joke that the meat might be, well, dog.
That joke is the whole point. German immigrants brought their long, low dachshund dogs over along with their long, low sausages, and the resemblance was too good to pass up. Even back in Germany people had called the things "little-dog" or "dachshund" sausages!
So when Americans started winking that the cheap street sausage was made of actual dog, they were really just running with a gag the Germans started. The name stuck because it was funny. We have been making fun of our own favorite food for about 140 years.
That’s fun! Now do the hamburger!!
If the hot dog's history is murky, the hamburger's is a full-blown bar argument, and Wisconsin has entered the chat.
Let's start with the obvious origin of the name "hamburger": Hamburg, Germany.
Hamburg was a huge port, and a dish called "Hamburg steak," which was hand-ground beef that was lightly salted, then formed into a patty or fillet, and usually served raw with onions and breadcrumbs, although sometimes it was smoked for flavor.
The Hamburg steak made its way to America on the same ships that carried German immigrants to New York and Boston. You will see claims that the fancy New York restaurant Delmonico's was serving it in the 1830s, but food historians think those early menus are fakes. The solid evidence puts Hamburg steak on American menus by the 1870s, and in popular cookbooks like "Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook Book" by 1884.
So the patty is German. But who first slapped that patty between bread and made the sandwich we actually eat?
Ding, ding, ding, let the cage match begin! Here's a rundown of who has the claims:
- Charlie Nagreen, Seymour, Wisconsin, 1885. At fifteen years old, Charlie was a young entrepreneur, selling meatballs at the county fair, and not selling many because you can't walk around a fair eating a meatball. So he flattened them and stuck them between two slices of bread. "Hamburger Charlie" became a fixture at that fair for decades, and Seymour calls itself the "Home of the Hamburger" to this day, complete with a statue of Charlie on Depot Street and an annual Burger Fest. This is the one I want to be true, because it's a great story, and I want Wisconsin to win, but the skeptics ask a fair question: was a flattened meatball on bread really a hamburger, and where did the name come from?
- Frank and Charles Menches, Hamburg, New York, 1885. This pair were traveling vendors who ran out of pork for their sausage sandwiches, so they swapped in ground beef, and named it after the town they were in. One knock on their story: they also claimed to have invented the ice cream cone, so it sounds like they may just be taking credit for any old food invention.
- Fletcher "Uncle Fletch" Davis, Athens, Texas, late 1880s. Uncle Fletch was said to have brought his beef-patty sandwich to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, and it was from this exposure that the burger really did catch fire nationally. Texas was confident enough to pass a legislative resolution in 2007 naming him the inventor. But Texas will claim anything, so I don't know how much stock we want to put in this claim.
- Oscar Weber Bilby, near Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1891. Oscar grilled ground beef on homemade buns. The Oklahoma governor backed his claim with a proclamation in 1995.
- Louis Lassen, New Haven, Connecticut, around 1900. Louis was a Danish immigrant (so not even the German in this story) who, the family says, threw some ground steak trimmings between two slices of toast for a customer in a hurry. His lunch counter, Louis' Lunch, is still open, still serves them on toast, and still will not let you put ketchup on one. Google and the Library of Congress both tend to give Lassen the official nod.
That's five claims, and sorting out the truth is impossible. Also, again, I understand there are state proclamations, statues in Seymour, and Library of Congress recognitions, but, come on, Hamburg steak was being eaten on bread before any of these guys "invented" anything.
Most likely a bunch of clever cooks all landed on the same idea around the same time because it was obvious and it was good.
Oh, and as a student of Latin, I can't help dragging one more contender into the ring. There's a recipe in an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius for a dish called isicia omentata: minced meat blended with pine nuts, heavily spiced, formed into a patty, and cooked through.
Suspiciously close to a burger, right? People love to call it the first one. But before we extend the laurel crown to the Romans, Christopher Carosa, whose book Hamburger Dreams is down in my reading list, makes a good case that it wasn't really a burger at all.
The isicia omentata was wrapped in caul fat instead of tucked into a bun, and the meat was probably pork. So maybe the Romans invented the burger, right alongside the roads and the aqueducts. Or maybe they just invented what this whole section is really about: arguing over who invented the burger.
Nice! Love those stories, but what really goes into a hot dog or hamburger? Do I want to know?
Ah, the age-old joke about not wanting to know about what goes into the sausage. We already mentioned the joke about the Germans putting their wiener dogs into wiener sausages, but for many years, Americans had good reason not to trust what went into their hot dogs.
In 1906 Upton Sinclair published "The Jungle," a novel that exposed the filthy conditions inside Chicago's meatpacking plants and set off a national uproar, one big enough to push Congress into passing the country's first real food-safety laws that same year. The effect on the hamburger was simple: people read about what was in the meat, and a lot of them would not go near ground beef for years afterward. Ground meat products like the hot dog and the hamburger suddenly had a reputation problem.
Don’t worry - the hamburger cleaned up its act, and accidentally invented fast food
I know a lot about the Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 that was a direct result of what was written in The Jungle, as it is what established the authority of the United States Department of Agriculture to inspect meat products, to this day, but I had no clue how the reputation of ground meat got saved in the minds of the burger-eating public.
In 1921, a short-order cook named Walt Anderson and a real estate man named Billy Ingram opened a hamburger stand with $700 between them. It was decades after The Jungle hit bookshelves, but people still thought ground beef was dirty. So Walt & Billy did the opposite of hiding. They built the place out of white porcelain and stainless steel, dressed the staff in spotless uniforms, and put the kitchen right out where you could watch the food being made. They even called it White Castle, white for clean, castle for solid, and modeled the building on a Chicago water tower.
Anderson had figured out something else, too. Back in his earlier diner he ground the beef right behind the counter in plain sight, on purpose, to put customers at ease about what was going into their sandwich. Not only did he have a method to convince customers the beef was safe, he also had a trick for cooking it fast: smash a wad of beef flat on a hot griddle with onions, and you have got a burger in a fraction of the time. White Castle sold those little burgers five for a nickel under the slogan "Buy 'em by the Sack," and became the first fast-food hamburger chain in the world, and was the first to sell a billion burgers.
Neat! Now tell me about the hot dog eating contests!!
Hot dog eating contests are one of the most fascinating "don't want to watch, but can't look away" spectacles in America. The most famous one is surely Nathan's Famous.
Now, when you tune in, you may hear that the Nathan's Famous hot dog eating contest has been held every Fourth of July since 1916, the year Nathan opened his stand, and that it started when four immigrants argued over who was the most American and settled it by seeing who could eat the most hot dogs. It is a perfect story.
It is also completely made up. Nathan's own press agents invented the "since 1916" backstory in the early 1970s to get the contest into the newspapers, and the real first contest was in 1972. One of those publicists, Mortimer Matz, admitted it flat out to the New York Times in 2010: "In Coney Island pitchman style, we made it up." The bit about the four patriotic immigrants got added even later.
And like so many pieces of great marketing, it worked. The contest is now a genuine, beloved American tradition. Tens of thousands of people show up, millions watch on TV, and champions like Joey Chestnut pack away more than 70 hot dogs in ten minutes. We invented a tradition out of thin air, told everyone it was old, and then made it real by believing in it. America. Heck yeah.
Before we go, could you just seriously answer what’s in a hot dog?
Oh, of course I can!
Today, most commercially available hot dogs are what is called an emulsified sausage. You take meat, fat, water, spices, and usually a curing agent, and pulverize it until it makes a smooth paste. You can then stuff that paste into sausage casings or forms, and cook it to make hot dogs. The process gives you the smooth texture and even flavor that everyone loves about hot dogs. The cure gives the hot dog the nice red color that we love and helps keep the hot dogs safe to eat.
If you'd like to know a bit more about how curing works, check out last week's Dispatch about hams!
There are also coarse-ground wieners where the meat is just chopped, not emulsified, but they are more of a niche product.
I know emulsified meat sounds gross...and it kinda looks gross too...but it's a super safe process that can take meat that otherwise would get tossed out and turn it into something delicious!
Gross...can we just instead focus on the big picture?
Check out these stats instead of thinking about emulsified meat!
- Americans eat about 50 billion burgers a year, or about 3 per person per week, or 150 per year.
- McDonald's serves around 75 million burgers per day.
- Hamburgers make up about 60% of all sandwiches sold!
- 20 billion hot dogs are consumed every year, about 70 per person.
- 19 million of those dogs are enjoyed at MLB stadiums...just about 8,000 per game.
- Of course, only one stadium sells more brats than hot dogs...Milwaukee's own American Family Field.
- The average price for a ballpark dog in 2026 was $5.80.
- And finally, the record for hot dogs consumed in a single baseball game isn't even from an American team! On May 11, 2026, 40,971 Toronto Blue Jays spectators wolfed down 102,202 hot dogs, beating the previous record of 92,221. Of course, the hot dogs were priced at 77¢, making this a deal for the spectators!
Wow, that was pretty awesome! Got anything else to add?
So much, but you'll need to listen to our "The Discussion" podcast with my co-host Bridget to hear more. For now, let's wrap up this dispatch with this:
Whether you like your hot dog Chicago style, topped with chili, or squirted with ketchup (either way is fine in my book), and no matter how you like to top your burger, these two titans of the American food scene deserve celebration.
Like so many American success stories, they arrived on a boat, got a little bit of an entrepreneurial hustle behind them, and have become big, big stars. This 4th of July, celebrate America with a hot dog and a hamburger!
Happy Birthday, America: I love your tangled roots, I love your coming together of cultures, and I love your food.
250 looks great on you. Here's to many more!
Book Suggestions!
Hamburger America by George Motz
Hamburger Dreams by Christopher Carosa
Famous Nathan by Lloyd Handwerker and Gil Reavill
Hot Dog: A Global History by Bruce Kraig
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