Wiener Wimps -- In Seattle, A Good Hot Dog Is A Rare Breed

SEATTLE IS NOT A HOT-DOG town.

Oh, we eat a few million a year - quite a few million, in fact, but nothing like New York or Boston or Chicago. I took a quick survey. Based on the production and sales for hot-dog buns in the Puget Sound area, we consume about 25 million hot dogs a year. That's not much.

Twenty-five million sounds like a lot. But when you stack us up against the national average, as hot-dog eaters we are nowhere near what we ought to be. It's a shame.

Americans eat about 17 billion hot dogs a year, or about 75 hot dogs per capita. We are so far below the national average that in Seattle, when you hear the term "hot dog," most people think of a crazy kid on a ski slope. It's sad.

I can never remember whether I was 8 years old the summer night I ate six hot dogs at Savin Rock, or 6 years old the night I ate eight hot dogs.

There were reasons for my splendid excess. One was my grandmother's fondness for bingo. We lived near the Savin Rock amusement park west of New Haven, Conn., with its beachside roller coasters, its shooting galleries, its giant bingo parlors and a myriad of hot-dog stands.

These were no ordinary hot-dog stands. New Haven was blessed with two gustatorial immigrant traditions: Italian master pizza makers (still the best in the world) and superb German sausage makers all over town. You didn't just go to eat a hot dog; you went to eat somebody's hot dog. Each sausage maker had a following. I, fortunately, loved them all.

Grandma would walk down to the bingo hall with me in tow. When I got bored - which happened quickly and often - she would slip me a dime and tell me to take off for a while. I cruised the hot dog stands.

"Don't call them hot dogs!" said Marianne Stewin the other day. Marianne and her husband, Hans Stewin, run Hans' Sausage and Delicatessen in Burien (717 S.W. 148th St.), where 50 varieties of custom sausages are made. Hot dog does have a derogatory ring to it. Indeed, at one time in Coney Island, the term was banned from commercial signage. True.

Sausages have been a part of human consumption for at least 3,500 years (invented by our recent enemies, the Babylonians, in what is now Iraq). But the frankfurter has a more traceable history. The "frank" was invented in 1852, in Germany, by a team of butchers from Frankfurt.

It was a spiced, finely ground, mildly smoked sausage in a very thin casing, with a characteristic bend reminiscent of a dachshund's swayback.

Another popular wurst was the wiener, named, of course, for its city of origin, Wien - or Vienna.

PAC26

fixes in GOLDM and RABANART:

His latest book, "Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America," released this month, has been compared to de Tocqueville's expansive commentaries on the U.S. Through the experiences of modern-day immigrants, Raban explores places like New York City, Guntersville, Ala., and the Florida Keys, subjecting each to his probing imagination. The book ends with a long and insightful chapter on Seattle, reflecting not only on the Korean immigrant boom in the city, but on his own reasons for moving here.

P.12, TWO MEN:

Jay Park talks with Jonathan Raban, who has written about Park in his book, "Hunting Mister Heartbreak: A Discovery of America."

The Scandinavian fishermen and loggers who had formed the original backbone of Seattle's working population, and who still held the suburb of Ballard as a Nordic fastness, had felt immediately comfortable here. It was fjord country, with wooden houses reaching down on the edge of half-wild, half-tame water. On Puget Sound at night, looking across to the lights of Winslow and Suquamish, one might easily be on the Oresund at Halsingborg, with Elsinore twinkling on the far shore. The forest, the sea, the lakes were things that were already memories in the imagination of the rawest newcomer. In Seattle for the first time, he knew that he'd been here before. The names have become interchangeable in American usage, but there are technical differences.

The wiener is longer (six to seven inches) and thinner than a frankfurter and packed in a sheep's-gut casing. The sturdier frankfurters are usually packed (five to six to the pound) in hog casings.

All real hot dogs are smoked in genuine gut casings. So called skinless franks are processed in peelable synthetic membranes.

But whatever you call them - franks, wieners, dogs - the boiled or grilled sausage in a bun is strictly American. Three German-Americans played prominent roles: Antoine Feuchtwanger of St. Louis (originally from Frankfurt), Charles Feltman of Brooklyn and Coney Island (also originally from Frankfurt) and New Yorker Nathan Handwerker.

Feuchtwanger is the man credited with enclosing frankfurters in bread (allegedly after he ran out of plates) in the 1880s. A decade later Feltman, a Coney Island pie baker and peddler, decided to switch to hot sandwiches instead, piling hot sauerkraut and mustard over the sausages. He prospered and later opened his own restaurant, Feltman's German Beer Garden. In 1913, Feltman hired a young assistant, Nathan Handwerker, as a roll slicer.

When Feltman raised the price of his frankfurters from a nickel to a dime, two struggling vaudevillians - Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante - persuaded Nathan to branch out on his own and restore the 5-cent sandwich.

Nathan did. And in the process founded Nathan's Famous.

The term "hot dog" probably dates to 1906, when Hearst sports cartoonist T.A. (Tad) Dorgan began caricaturing German figures as dachshunds, sometimes showing talking sausages as dogs (suggesting the Coney Island franks might be made of dog meat) - a culinary slur that led the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce to ban the term from outdoor sign advertising in 1913.

"Red hots" were born at the old Polo Grounds in turn-of-the-century New York City when Harry Magely Stevens, director of catering, had the rolls heated (to keep the sausages warmer) and had his roving vendors cry out: "Get your red hots here." The rest is history - or, if you will, more history.

In Chicago, the hot dog took on its most elaborate form. The boiled sausage was placed in a lightly steamed poppy-seed bun with mustard, relish, chopped raw onions, a longitudinally sliced piece of cucumber or kosher pickle, two or more hot-pickled "sport" peppers, wedges of tomato and an obligatory sprinkling of celery salt. The whole assemblage came wrapped in a waxed-paper cylinder.

Chicago today has more than 2,000 hot-dog stands and push carts. When I was 17 and away from home for the first time, I attempted to patronize them all. To the best of my knowledge, Seattle has only one Chicago-style hot dog stand: Chicago Red Hots, 12504 Lake City Way N.E., where the all-beef sausage is made by Vienna Beef and shipped from Chicago.

Locally, Bavarian Meat Products makes exceptional wieners, available at their own retail store in the Pike Place Market (1920 Pike Place) and in many area supermarkets.

Bavarian Meats was founded during the World's Fair in 1962 by Max Hofstatter, a native Swiss who was raised in Munich. His sons, Jerry and Bob, presently run the company.

The above-mentioned Hans Stewin crafts an outstanding frankfurter-style hot dog (I ate two in the process of writing this) and I embellish them with nothing more than plain yellow mustard. French's is OK; Plochman's Mild Yellow is more complex and better.

Hot dogs are, of course, fully cooked when purchased. But heating brings out more flavor. Boiling is fine. Slow grilling over charcoal is a must outdoors. Or you can do both: Simmer the hot dogs for a few minutes to heat through, then grill them for a few more minutes, but don't overly char the skins and don't overcook.

Hot dogs in these days of heightened food consciousness - and sometimes misguided food fears - seem to be slipping from favor by the fastidious.

But you don't have to eat six or eight in an afternoon. Four or five will do.

JOHN HINTERBERGER'S FOOD COLUMNS AND RESTAURANT REVIEWS APPEAR SUNDAYS IN PACIFIC AND FRIDAYS IN TEMPO. HE ALSO WRITES A WEDNESDAY COLUMN FOR THE SCENE SECTION OF THE SEATTLE TIMES. ROD MAR IS A TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER.