Snoot Sandwich & Hot Dog (1939)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

  See the ADS-L archives for the Westbrook Pegler article on "TAD" that
appeared in the WASHINGTON POST, about ten years earlier.  This 1939 article
contains useful information about Stevens' ownership of the cartoon, plus there is a
mention about the "snoot sandwich."  These TAD "facts" are wrong--but that's
the point.
   Pegler wrote for the NY WORLD-TELEGRAM.
   What's in the next DARE for "snoot"?


   17 June 1939, APPLETON POST-CRESCENT (Appleton, Wisconsin), pg. 9, cols.
7-8:
_Enjoyment of Hot Dog Knows_
_No Creed or Social Station_
         BY WESTBROOK PEGLER
   New York--The American hot dog, a habit-forming sausage, received the name
by which it is now known to all clean-minded, right-thinking Americans and to
the British king and queen and their subjects from the late Tad Dorgan, the
sport page cartoonist and humorist of the Hearst papers at the time of the Thaw
trial, in 1906.  This delicacy up to that time was known variously as the
wienerwurst, the frankfurter and the Coney Island red hot.
   There was a humorous superstition that the Coney island red hot contained
a large ingredient of dog meat, and Tad, whose humor was often unexplainable,
as in the case of his famous phrase, "Yes, we have no bananas," introduced a
family, or litter, of little animated sausages into the comics with which he
was lampooning the legal farce then in progress at the old criminal courts
building.  These little sausages would be seen in queen antics, holding
conversation in talk balloons while little fox terriers, frisking through the
disconnected scenario, tossed off remarks which identified them as departed relatives.
Tad called them hot dogs, and the day he died Mrs. Dorgan presented to the late
Harry Stevens, the New York ball yard and race track caterer, the original
drawing of the first of the series in which the name "hot dog" appeared.  The
drawing now hangs on the wall of the Stevens office from which the late Harry's
sons direct a business extending, geographically, from Boston to Miami and
culinarily, if such word there be, from caviar and champagne to dogs and pop.
   The Stevens dog is prepared according to a house formula by Otto Stahl in
New York and the Essjay company in Maryland, and is boiled, not fried or
grilled, and served in a long roll also made to private specifications.  The
Stevens firm has served thousands of miles of these dogs, but does not sell them in
bulk or off the premises of the ball yards and horse yards for which it holds
concessions.
   In the east hot dogs vary greatly in content,  some containing cereal and
some being composed entirely of meat, but eastern dogs, generally, are not
highly spiced.  West of the Alleghanies the popular taste demands more tang, and
the so-called dog that is sold in some western ball parks is not only highly
seasoned but is shorter and fatter--a veritable German breakfast sausage--and
usually is grilled on a gas plate.
_New York Turned Up_
_Its Nose at Popcorn_
   New York will have nothing to do with popcorn, a western delicacy, and
attempts to popularize it at the New York ball parks were expensive failures.
Nor has the hot tamale or chile con carne or chile mac. which is the shortname
for chilemacaroni, ever enjoyed any demand here by contrast with the popularity
of those eccentricities in the middle west and southwest.  The westerners
also consume vastly greater quantities of hamburger than easterners and have
neither social nor gastronomic fears of the onion, raw or fried.
   Tamales, chile con carne and chile mac may be obtained in the neighborhood
of Harlem and the snoot sandwich, a specialty of Beale st.--or, anyway, of
the Memphis negro night life sector--also is to be had.  The snoot sandwich and
sandwiches made from the ears and tails of pigs, fried in grease, are
delicious and are hereby recommended, although the king and queen, had they been
confronted with such, might have been pardoned for demanding kippers instead,
   It is all in the point of view and the training of the individual.  The
kipper is a terrible thing to most Americans, but Englishmen rip kippers and
sift the bones out of their mustaches and teeth with practiced skill.  A cannibal
feasting on the boiled shank of a missionary probably would regard an English
breakfast kipper as unfit food, as, indeed, it does seem to all inexperienced
persons on first acquaintance.
_All the Very Best_
_Americans Eat Hot Dogs_
   The notion that the dog is vulgar and that therefore it was socially
unseemly to serve the same to their Britannic majesties vanishes when it is known
that practically all of the richest, and therefore, of course, the very best,
Americans eat hot dogs.  At the races the aristocracy belly up to the counters
and take them from the hands of the counter men, smear them with mustard and
wander off with yellow goo dripping down their fronts, and one glimpse of a
Vanderbilt in this activity, or one tast of a good dog, is enough to convince the
most skeptical that this is not a patronizing affectation of the quality.
   Babe Ruth, incidentally, sometimes would eat four or five on the bench in
the course of a ball game, and overindulgence once made him ill and laid him
up for several days.  A dozen, however, is too many.  Eight, maybe, or, at the
outside, nine, but twelve is excess.

(You Nathan's competition guys hear that?--ed.)