 A Doggone Shame
SO, HERE WE ARE, just coming off of National Hot Dog Month, and yet we still have absolutely no clue what we’re doing.
None.
Used to be, you bought a package of wieners, you took them home, you boiled them. Boom — Saturday lunch.
Fancy was grilling the dog. If you really wanted to do it up, you put cheese inside it, wrapped it in bacon, and broiled the thing.
The connoisseurs bought all-beef frankfurters. The rest of us bought whatever-they-put-in-’em ones. Pork. Beef. Eyelids. Didn’t matter.
A hot dog was American.
Americans were simple.
Done.
But, as you no doubt noticed while observing July’s monthlong celebration of the wiener, times have changed.
You know what they have now? The gourmet hot dog.
Yes, I said gourmet and hot dog. As in, oxy and moron.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the lowly dog has gone decidedly upscale.
There is a place in Miami called Franktitude, the Journal reports, that serves a frank with avocado, tomato, wasabi mayonnaise, and banana chips. It’s called, appropriately enough, Unique Frank.
There is a place in Chicago, the story continues, that until recently served foie gras hot dogs. That’s right, a wiener concocted from the most exalted of French foods. On the other hand, foie gras is just goose liver. How exalted can liver be?
Never mind. It’s the principle of the thing.
There is some guy making peanut-butter hot dogs, and there’s another guy, right here in my hometown of Washington, D.C., making hot dogs from Kobe beef. They cost 20 bucks!
Twenty bucks? For a hot dog?!
I ate at an upscale, white-tablecloth restaurant last night that had words on its menu like velouté and emincé. In other words, at a place with some pretension. I ordered the Grilled Tasmanian Ocean Trout with avocado relish, balsamic onions, and citrus-cumin reduction. In other words, the pretentious trout. And yet, even at this place in one of the city’s higher-dollar neighborhoods, the cost of this dish was only $19.
We’re talking about getting a whole bunch of stuff I don’t even understand for less than a hot dog costs.
Has the world gone mad? Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
I’ll tell you where you haven’t gone: the ballpark.
At baseball stadiums these days, you’re as likely to find sushi as you are to find a hot dog. The good old-fashioned wiener? It’s going to wherever “Joltin’ Joe” is.
It had to happen, I guess.
Things evolve.
That’s what they call it, anyway, when something recognizable becomes something unrecognizable.
I NEVER WISHED I were an Oscar Mayer wiener — not even when doing so was in style years ago, when the Wienermobile, the car that looks like a hot dog, was driving through towns, with a little kid’s voice belting out the lyrics to the maddeningly stick-in-your-head (even these many years later) melody:
Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
That is what I truly want to beeeeeeee
‘Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
Everyone would be in love with me
EVEN THEN I didn’t wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener.
I did wish that I could get Wendy Whatshername to laugh at my jokes. But I don’t think she would have laughed, even if I had been an Oscar Mayer wiener.
It seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, everyone would not be in love with me — they would want to eat me. (Unless, of course, they are vegan, in which case they would want to put me on trial as an enemy of the state.)
Now, maybe I’m splitting hairs here. Maybe they would want to eat me because they loved me.
Even so, it never occurred to me that in order for everybody to love me, I would have to be a wiener.
Yet I get the broader point: Everybody loves hot dogs.
But these days, apparently, everyone does not love hot dogs, as the Billy Joel song goes, just the way they are.
TO BE SURE, dogs have long enjoyed idiosyncrasies. There is the Chicago dog, an all-beef frank served in a poppyseed bun and topped with tomato, sport peppers, celery salt, mustard, onion, radioactive-green pickle relish, and a dill pickle spear.
There is the famous Coney dog, which, as it happens, did not originate on Coney Island. The general consensus is that the Coney was invented in Michigan. True or not, this dog, topped with beanless chili, mustard, and sweet onion, is nowhere better than at a little greasy spoon called Angelo’s Coney Island and Grill in Flint, Michigan.
In New York City, the street dog is classically served with onion sauce, sauerkraut, and spicy deli mustard. Out in Arizona, they top their franks with salsa.
But the regional variations are not what we’re talking about here.
What we’re talking about is something else. Marketing, maybe. Or the impulse to reinvent. Whatever the case, as the Journal put it, “The classic American hot dog … is having an identity crisis.”
Marketing, reinvention, identity crises — they’re all as all-American as the hot dog.
And the hot dog, whether traditional or newfangled, is still as American as green-chile apple pie.
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