“Is it a hotdog day?” I asked, with barely suppressed excitement. It was, Michele said. “Hip, hip hooray, it’s a hotdog day!” I may have cheered.
I am not ashamed to admit nothing turns me into an over-excited child like the prospect of an American hotdog for lunch, preferably with some shoestring fries and a big dollop of ketchup on the side.
Michele, bless her orange Le Creuset pots, is a woman of refined sensibility and impeccable palate, who thinks nothing of spending hours slow-cooking oxtail for a braised oxtail risotto with gorgonzola crème fraîche. But thankfully she’ll put her finer feelings aside to make hotdogs for Lush Places’ gastronomic barbarian.
I am, rather unfashionably, a junk-food aficionado, a proud connoisseur of crap. Without a word of a lie, one of the highlights of my life was discovering there is such a thing as Worcestershire Sauce crisps. That I stumbled on them in a corner shop in the delightful West Midlands spa town of Malvern only made the discovery sweeter, or, I should say, more umami. Malvern, you see, is in the shire of Worcestershire.
For many years, too, I have been obsessed with Australia’s Smith’s barbecue crisps, to the extent that when Michele made a work trip across the Tasman long ago, I asked her to bring me back a box of them. This, too, was a highlight. I made that box last for weeks.
My single defence for having Billy Bunter’s eating habits is that I adore comfort food, and there is no comfort food quite like a hotdog, not even the Kiwi classic, a badly barbecued sausage wrapped in a slice of buttered white bread.
Not all dogs are created equal, of course, and their enjoyment can be entirely situational. There was a time on Auckland’s Queen St, in the 1990s probably, when denizens of the night could soak up the evening’s indulgences at hotdog stands dotted at strategic points along the Golden Mile so one didn’t have to stagger too far to find one.
I am sure even then, in the cold light of day, no sane person would claim those stands produced fine examples of the hotdog maker’s art, nor that their fare was worth the money or the risk. In fact they were barely hotdogs at all, just a cheap roll, a third-rate frankfurter and a choice of ketchup or mustard. Only Philistines asked for the ketchup. As bad as they were, around midnight, after taking strong drink, with ketchup or no ketchup, those humble dogs were like ambrosia.
Any true connoisseur of the hotdog form knows the bun and the sausage are but a blank canvas. While the origins and the ingredients of the first dog are lost to the coleslaw of time, it is thought a German immigrant came up with the basic idea in the 1860s.
Since then almost every part of the United States of Frankfurter has developed its own unique dog, though there are some very strict rules about how you make them.
According to the wonderfully named National Hotdog and Sausage Council, you always “dress the dog” not the bun, and the condiments must be applied in a very strict order: wet ones like mustard go first, chunky ones like relish and sauerkraut next, followed by “shredded” cheese (if you are having it, though I don’t know why you would), followed by the seasonings. Also, red sauce is verboten. As Dirty Harry said, “Nobody, I mean nobody, puts ketchup on a hot dog”, and it pays not to cross Dirty Harry.
Beyond that, almost anything goes. A recent New York Times field guide to the hotdogs of America included examples dressed with cream cheese (the Seattle Dog), a pile of fries (the Polish Boy from Cleveland) and sautéed onions spiked with Coca-Cola (the Reindeer Dog from Alaska).
America might now be a fatally divided, late-stage capitalist hellhole, but it’s still hotdog heaven.
At Lush Places, we favour the Lush Dog, aka the Chicago Dog. This one is “dragged through the garden”: yellow mustard, relish, chopped white onions, tomato slices, a dill pickle spear, pickled sport peppers and celery salt.
Unfortunately, we’ve never found the correct poppy seed buns. Still, Michele’s are almost as good as her braised oxtail risotto.
