Meat + Poultry - June 2010 - 70

Introduction

Hitting a culinary home run
BY TOM SUPER
meatpoultry@sosland.com

merica's love affair with hot
dogs is red hot, especially in our
nation's ballparks - and the relationship has been around almost as long
as America's favorite pastime.
Although not in the original
version of "Take Me Out to
the Ballgame," hot dogs

A

Tom Super, director of media outreach
with the National Hot Dog & Sausage
Council (Photo courtesy of NHD&SC)

joined peanuts and Cracker Jacks on
the concession menus of ballparks
in the 1890s. Some historians point
to 1893 as the year sausages became
the standard fare at baseball parks.
This tradition is believed to have
been started by a St. Louis bar owner,
Chris Von der Ahe, a German immigrant who also owned the St. Louis
Browns major league baseball team
(now the Cardinals). The food was a
great compliment to the beer garden
he had built in his ballpark, dubbed
"Coney Island West."

By the early 1900s, these sausages
in buns were becoming increasingly popular at public events - boxing
matches, fairs, horse races and especially, baseball games. The
widespread popularity
made sense - they were
inexpensive and easy to
produce in mass quantities. Not to mention
that because they are
pre-cooked, they just
needed to be re-heated,
an attribute that makes
hot dogs adaptable for
many venues. By knowing
the exact size and
weight of a product and having
it available
with minimal preparation time,
vendors knew
exactly how
much prof it
could be made
on each item
and how many could
be sold in a given time.
Fans and consumers loved them,
too. Hot dogs were inexpensive, a
warm meal, easy to handle and tasted great. The same holds true today.
The hot dog has proven to be the true
"Iron Man" of stadium concessions
- Cal Ripken Jr. can't hold a candle
to the tube steak.
With new, luxurious ballparks being built every year, many with the
most extensive menus on the planet,
the hot dog remains the number one
best-seller year after year in a vast
majority of venues. AutoZone Park,
home of the Memphis Redbirds minor league team, claims to the be the
only ballpark where hot dogs are not
the number one food seller, coming
in second to Rendezvous barbecue).

The National Hot Dog & Sausage
Council predicts that Major League
Baseball ballparks around the country will serve 21,378,064 hot dogs this
season, enough to round the bases
29,691 times. If laid end-to-end, the
dogs would stretch from the Baseball
Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., to
Coors Field in Denver, Colorado, with
enough left over to give a hot dog to
every fan at every Colorado Rockies'
home game for the entire 2010 season.
Fenway Park, home of the Boston
Red Sox is projected to fi nish number one in hot dog sales for the year,
with 1.67 million.
In addition, the Council predicts
ballparks will sell 4,933,853 sausages
this year. No park serves more sausages
year after year than Miller Park, home
of the Milwaukee Brewers and the famous Klement's Sausage Race. In fact,
it is predicted that Miller Park will sell
more sausages during the 2010 season
than 22 stadiums will sell hot dogs.
One cannot talk about hot dogs and
baseball, though, without mentioning
Babe Ruth. It's well documented that
the hot dog was the Bambino's performance enhancing drug of choice.
Legend has it the Babe once ate 12 hot
dogs and drank eight bottles of soda
between games of a doubleheader.
There is just something about walking into the stadium and smelling the
hot dogs and brats cooking. It conjures
up memories of going to the game as
a kid; backyard barbecues with family
and friends and good times in general. It simply puts a smile on your face.
Maybe Humphrey Bogart put it
best, "A hot dog at the ballpark is better than a steak at the Ritz." ■
Tom Super is the director of media outreach with
the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council and
an avid baseball fan. For more information on
the NHD&SC, go to: http://www.hot-dog.org/ .
We would like to hear from you - to comment
on this story or to request reprints, contact us
by e-mail at meatpoultry@sosland.com.

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Meat + Poultry - June 2010

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