I'm posting something I wrote as a sidebar in next month's food and beer issue of Mid-Atlantic Brewing News (My editor says you've got to promise to get copies anyway) that seems appropriate to this thread.

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Hail the humble hot dog as accompaniment to cold beer. You could consider its history. Rather, you could if anyone really knew its history for sure.

It’s said the frankfurter was created in Frankfurt. Unless it’s a wiener because it was invented in Vienna (in German, Wien).

The burghers of Frankfurt say the Viennese choose to ignore that the purported inventor of the wiener learned to make sausage in their city. On this topic, what the Viennese choose to ignore are the burghers of Frankfurt.

Known as hot dachshund sausages in the 1800s for their resemblance to the long thin dogs, the name hot dog was supposedly coined in 1901 by New York newspaper cartoonist Tad Dorgan. Facing an imminent deadline and uncertain how to spell dachshund, he captioned them “hot dogs” instead.

However, no copy of that cartoon has ever been found, and students at Yale University were eating and writing about “hot dogs” years earlier.

A hot dog in English is a “perrito caliente” in Spanish, a “cane caldo” in Italian and a “chien chaud” to the French.

When baseball player Barry Bonds visited Philadelphia in May he was one homer shy of Babe Ruth’s career home run total of 714. A fan’s banner hanging in the outfield of the Phillies' Citizens Bank Park reminded the San Francisco Giants slugger accused of using illegal performance-enhancing substances, “Ruth did it on hot dogs and beer.”

Some say being cooked in beer is the secret of baseball’s top-selling Dodger Dog but those in charge of ballpark concessions in Los Angeles deny that’s how they sold nearly two million of the team’s trademark hot dogs last season.

According to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council, on the Internet at www.hot-dog.org, the average per capita hot dog consumption in America is 60 per year and over seven billion hot dogs will be eaten in the U.S. between Memorial Day and Labor Day, 155 million of them during the Fourth of July holiday alone. The council’s researchers found that the most popular condiment on a hot dog is mustard, although when kids were asked what they’d put on a hot dog “if Mom wasn’t watching,” 25 percent picked chocolate sauce.

One of the unsolved riddles of the universe asked by a Nazi-fighting Tibetan mystic kung-fu master portrayed by actor Chow Yun-Fat in the somewhat ludicrous 2003 film The Bulletproof Monk is, “Why do hot dogs come in packages of ten, but hot dog buns only come in packages of just eight?”

Earlier this year a tasting panel organized by food section editors of the Arizona Republic newspaper selected Scotland’s Fraoch Heather Ale as the best beer to pair with a grilled hot dog. “Absolutely great,” enthused Mark Tarbell, owner and chef of the national-award-winning Tarbell’s Restaurant in Phoenix, “the dog brought out the fruity character in the ale.” New Belgium Brewing Company’s Fat Tire Amber Ale was the Arizona panel’s second choice, while Bud Light “was the beer whose flavors washed away when munching on the dog.”

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