A Chicago-style hot dog, Chicago dog, or Chicago red hot is a hot dog made with a natural casing all-beef frankfurter (most often the Vienna Beef brand), that is typically served on a poppy seed bun and topped with yellow mustard, chopped white onions, neon relish, a dill pickle spear, tomato slices or wedges, pickled sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt.*
"The Chicago Dog", Hot Dog Chicago Style. Retrieved July 18, 2016. It originates from and is considered a defining symbol of Chicago, Illinois.Spina, Matthew (May 20, 2016). "A History of the Esteemed Chicago-Style Hot Dog", Thrillist. Retrieved August 26, 2016.Carruthers, John (March 31, 2015). "Mustard and Dreams: What It Takes to Run a Hot Dog Stand in Chicago", Serious Eats. Retrieved August 26, 2016.
The complete assembly of a Chicago hot dog is said to be "dragged through the garden" due to the many vegetable toppings. The method for cooking the hot dog varies depending on the vendor's preference. Most often they are steamed or water-simmered, or less often grilled over charcoal (in which case they are referred to as "char-dogs").
Vienna Beef's 'canonical' recipe does not include ketchup, and there is a widely shared consensus among most Chicagoans and aficionados that ketchup is an unacceptable addition, as its sweetness can overwhelm the salty and savory flavors of the Chicago dog's vegetable toppings.*
Adams, Cecil (August 30, 1991). "Why Is There No Ketchup on a Properly Made Hot Dog?", Chicago Reader. Retrieved February 22, 2015. A number of Chicago hot dog vendors outright refuse to offer ketchup as a topping, and some vendors even enforce rules against ketchup or post signs mocking the practice. The negative perception of ketchup in Chicago also ties back to the Chicago dog's Depression-era origins, during which ketchup was often used to mask the flavor of spoiled and low-quality meat.
History
The all-beef frankfurter The hot dog itself originates with the frankfurter würstchen, an all-pork sausage eaten in Frankfurt, Germany as early as the 13th century. In the 19th century, a butcher in Vienna added beef to the sausage mixture, giving rise to the wiener-frankfurter. The recipe soon followed Central European migration to the United States, and the Chicago-based David Berg sausage company was producing frankfurters out of machine-shredded meat scraps as early as 1860. The Oscar Mayer meats company famed for its national hot dog distribution was established in Chicago in 1884, though they initially focused only on selling traditional German sausages like bockwurst, liverwurst and weißwurst.
Many Chicagoans had their first taste of the Viennese-Frankfurter when Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants Emil Reichel and Sam Ladany, who had arrived from Vienna just a few years earlier, set up an "Austrian Village" stand to sell kosher all-beef frankfurters with onions and mustard at the famed 1893 World's Fair. The pair went on to establish the Vienna Beef company on Chicago's West Side the following year, and to this day, Vienna Beef frankfurters are considered one of the only frankfurters that are acceptable to include in a proper Chicago dog.Oxford Companion of Food and Drink in America One of the leading alternative brands, Red Hot Chicago [not to be confused with Chicago red hots, the unbranded style of frankfurter on which the company was based], was created by Ladany's grandson in 1986 and then purchased by Vienna Beef in 2012.
The younger Ladany once remarked that the Chicago-style hot dog was originally known as the "kosher-style" dog, and that it transitioned over time to the "Chicago-style" moniker. This adherence to kosher guidelines helped set apart the Chicago dog from rising regional variations like the New York hot dog, and most today do not consider a hot dog to be Chicago-style if the meat is not 100% beef. By 1900, eighty percent of all beef in the United States was being slaughtered and processed in the Union Stock Yards on Chicago's South Side, setting the expectation that beef, ideally in a natural casing, was the only suitable meat for a Chicago dog.
Heinz Tomato Catsup, which had first been manufactured in 1876, began to see a contemporaneous rise in prominence following the debut of its iconic octagonal glass bottle at its enormously popular pavilion in Chicago's 1893 World's Fair. But with its pungent, spice-heavy, and sometimes sugary flavor profile, ketchup (as it was later known) quickly came to be seen as a way to mask the flavors of low-quality foods. H. J. Heinz furthermore had to work to overcome a series of food safety scandals surrounding ketchup canneries and bottlers, going so far as to lobby for regulations on his own industry.
At the same time, Chicago's beef industry faced similar controversy with the 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair's invective novel The Jungle, which was filled with accounts of deplorable hygienic conditions at Chicago's Union Stock Yards. The popularity of the hot dog suffered with Sinclair's shocking assertions on sausage production:
Even so, hot dogs remained an ubiquitous street food whose portability made them ideal for events like fairs, street markets, and baseball games. There are few definitive accounts of when Chicago's first "ballpark dog" was served, but the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum theorizes that they were first sold either at New York City's Polo Grounds in the 1880s or at St. Louis' Sportsman's Park in the 1890s. Hot dog vendors undoubtedly would have been among the many informal street carts that gathered outside of Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox games in the early 20th century, as was common practice at the time. Chicago's oldest sausage manufacturer and distributor, the David Berg company, claimed to have baseball fans among its clients as early as 1901 - likely as the supplier of these carts. German-American restaurateur and Chicago Cubs owner Charles Weeghman introduced the first permanent and official ballpark concession stand behind the Wrigley Field (then Weeghman Park) grandstand in 1914, with hot dogs, popcorn, and peanuts among the stand's offerings.
The "dragged through the garden" depression dog The toppings that constitute the modern Chicago-style hot dog came together during the Great Depression at vegetable carts along Maxwell Street on Chicago's Near West Side. One of the Chicago dog's purported inventors, Abe "Fluky" Drexler, sold a five-cent "Depression Dog" special that contained lettuce, tomato, onions, unspecified peppers, mustard, and relish, plus an included side of french fries. Celery salt was introduced as the result of existence of many local celery farms, with Lake View being a celery farming area up until the 1920s and Lincoln Square calling itself the "celery capital of the world" at the time. This proliferation of a hot dog "with a salad on top" came to symbolize abundance and an affordable full meal at an austere time where fresh produce and more expensive whole cuts of meat were rapidly becoming luxuries that few could regularly afford.
The rejection of ketchup and imposition of a beef-only standard also arose from competition among Maxwell Street's hot dog carts to create the most bountiful and high-quality hot dog sandwich. With public concerns about meat quality driven in part by Upton Sinclair's novel, vendors could distinguish their frankfurters as being of the highest quality by claiming they refused to 'cover' any spoilage with ketchup. A commitment to all-beef hot dogs furthermore functioned as a source of local pride in Chicago's embattled meatpacking industry. The pork, turkey, and chicken included in hot dogs outside Chicago were and are still seen as lesser meats due to their lower costs and higher fat and cartilage content. And whereas Chicagoans received the freshest beef prepared locally in the South Side's Union Stockyards, other cities importing Chicago's beef had to contend with refrigeration technology still being in its early stages of development. Ketchup could thus be dismissed as a condiment better suited to accompanying lesser beef that had aged on its journey to destinations outside Chicago.
The toppings of the Chicago-style hot dog have furthermore been heavily influenced by the Near West Side's history as an immigration gateway. Sport peppers first gained notoriety in Chicago via the Mexican pavilion at the 1893 World's Fair, while the neon green relish may have first started out as English piccalilli - itself a derivative of Indian achar. Jewish bakeries had introduced Chicagoans to poppy seed breads, while the home gardens of Italian immigrants likely supplied tomatoes and other fresh vegetables to Maxwell Street's vendors. The neighborhood's numerous Central European immigrants meanwhile established and drove a large market for all kinds of sausage sandwiches, including the celebrated Maxwell Street Polish as just one alternative to the depression dog.
The modern Chicago dog As the United States emerged from the Depression into post-World War II abundance, Chicago's food industry saw an easing of cultural expectations in line with a growing national acceptance of processed foods. It was around this time that the modern 'Chicago red hot' was born - a non-Vienna Beef (and sometimes non-beef altogether) variation on the Chicago-style frankfurter that often used artificial food colorings, including the carcinogenic Red 40, to give the frankfurter a brilliant fluorescent red color.
Though never promoted or recognized as "Chicago style", the massive national success of the Chicago-born Oscar Mayer Wiener normalized deviation from the "kosher-style" standard even inside Chicago. Starting around 1929, Oscar Mayer had begun producing a skinless hot dog made by stuffing mechanically-separated mixtures of turkey, pork, beef, veal, and/or chicken trimmings inside of an inedible plant cellulose casing and cooking it until the ground meats congealed into a self-supporting structure that could then be removed from the casing. The hot dog achieved runaway success by mid-century due to innovative advertising campaigns like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and the "I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener" jingle.
The success of the Chicago red hot may have driven an effort by Vienna Beef to recover some of the "casing snap" texture and bright natural redness its franks lost after moving to a new hot dog production facility in 1972. Though the issue went unaddressed for over a decade, increasing corporate standards and consumer expectations would eventually bring about a new 'warming room' to replace a warming process that had once unwittingly occurred during transportation between the distant stuffing and smoking areas of Vienna Beef's original hot dog factory.
By the 1980s, Vienna Beef was looking to solidify its place as the undisputed sausage king of Chicago, and it undertook a marketing campaign to re-establish and equate itself with the kosher-style standards of the early 20th century. Former warehouse worker Jim Bodman purchased the company in 1983 and began to focus the company's messaging on its nostalgic meaning to Chicagoans. This included actions like standing tall by the "no ketchup" rule and promoting strong ties with Chicago's beloved sports franchises. As Vienna Beef expanded, it bought out many of its legacy competitors, including David Berg in 1992. At the same time, the company nationally expanded its manufacturing footprint into other meats and many other "Chicago-style" mainstays like Italian beef and neon green relish, and those products now comprise more than sixty percent of Vienna Beef's revenues.