Is a hot dog a sandwich? Chicagoans used to think so

While National Sandwich Day is a great time to celebrate Chicago’s incredible sandwich scene, I thought it’d be more fun to delve into a far more contentious question: Is a hot dog a sandwich?

This is one of the 21st century’s most amusingly unimportant debates. It has inspired partisans to ponder truly trivial aspects of the dish. Does the hinge on a hot dog bun disqualify it? Does a sausage technically count as a filling? You can order half sandwiches at some restaurants, but if anyone served you half a hot dog that would feel wrong. Merriam-Webster even weighed in, posting that “given that the definition of sandwich is ‘two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,’ there is no sensible way around it.”

To be clear, I usually side with the anti-sandwich crowd, because I don’t think definitions are mathematical equations. If enough people start using a word differently, the definition changes. If no one calls a hot dog a sandwich, then a hot dog is not a sandwich.

But this wasn’t always the case. There is plenty of evidence that people in early 20th century Chicago used to call the dish a hot dog sandwich.

The first mention I could find dates back to May 4, 1909, when the Chicago White Sox played the Cleveland Naps (now the Cleveland Guardians). The reporter’s carefully chronicling notes Naps player Claude Rossman “treated himself to a hot dog sandwich just before the game started.”

The 1920s seem to be the heyday of the hot dog sandwich. On July 3, 1922, Mrs. “Babe” Hassett was interviewed about what she’d like to see at Oak Street Beach, and she had a few concrete ideas: “Now if they’d build a good bathhouse with lockers in it — and a place, too, where you could buy a ‘hot dog’ sandwich when you’re hungry — a day here would be a lot more pleasant.”

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A more tragic example appeared in the paper July 6, 1925, describing how John Zimmerman drowned after saving the life of his “sweetheart, Miss Theo Kopp.” Apparently, he had been “sitting on the sand eating a ‘hot dog’ sandwich when Miss Kopp, who could not swim well, called for aid.”

As I found out while researching questionable vintage hot dog recipes, our reporters didn’t think too highly of the hot dog in the early 20th century. On Nov. 29, 1932, an unnamed writer even lamented that because of Prohibition, fruitcake was now no better than a hot dog. “O, what good fruitcake we used to have before the great calamity! But it had to go because fruitcake just simply had to have a few shots of sherry or brandy in it, or it didn’t have any more class than a hot dog sandwich.” (Fortunately, fruitcake got its liquor back after Prohibition ended on Dec. 5, 1933.)

[ Questionable Tribune hot dog recipes over the years ]

Yet, the 1930s is also when mentions of hot dogs as sandwiches start to decline. The dish is briefly mentioned on Aug. 14, 1954, in a story about how much sports fans love eating hot dog sandwiches, but only once. Recipe writers continued to use the term for a little while longer. On May 15, 1964, Mary Meade (a name shared by a succession of women recipe writers) noted the “ever-popular ‘hot dog’ sandwich probably is the favorite way to serve frankfurters.” Fran Zell explained on Oct. 23, 1975, that a chile con carne recipe could be served on a “hot dog sandwich.”

But by the 1980s, the term was nearly extinct. One of the very last mentions of a hot dog sandwich is in an advertisement from the Highland Park Chamber of Commerce, which notes the suburb has “three computer shops,” “fascinating forward ladies’ shops” and a restaurant with a “renowned hot dog sandwich.”

From then on, you might classify a hot dog as a sandwich, but the days of the “hot dog sandwich” itself were over.

nkindelsperger@chicagotribune.com

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