In the 17th and 18th centuries, British immigrants brought bangers to American shores, but the hot dog as it is known today is nearer to the German sausage. (The tradition of sausage-making is so established in Germany that Kraig cites a 1432 law regulating wurst.) While sausages as street food were common in American cities by the late 1700s, it was only after the Civil War that the sausage became, like so many other products of the age, machinated and industrialized. Meat moved from the butcher shop to the factory. And as it did, sausages homogenized. The hot dog was born.

This industrialization was possible for a few reasons. The growing American desire for meat and the ability to afford it, for one part. The construction and connection of railways, for another. New machinery had started to replace human butchers as well. By the 1870s, massive firms could swiftly slaughter, season, and process animals arriving by rail from the stockyards of the Midwest and turn them into hot dogs. Which was good, because the appetite for the encased meat product was growing. Americans wanted hot dogs, particularly the identical ones that came from name-brand companies such as Hormel or Armour.

Xenophobia played no small part in the demand for hot dogs. In the 1890s, America was experiencing its second wave of immigration, and many of the Eastern European arrivals were less than welcome. The handmade sausages hanging in an immigrant’s butcher shop were foreign and the man with the thick accent selling them suspicious.

But pleasingly uniform hot dogs sold from food carts seemed distinctly American, even if those carts were owned by immigrants. A decade later, as Upton Sinclair’s classic book The Jungle told horror stories about the labor conditions at meatpacking plants, some purveyors emphasized “pure” hot dogs as an alternative. Jewish-owned hot dog stands, with their kosher associations, made the all-beef hot dog number one in Chicago, even though many weren’t actually kosher. Nathan’s Famous on Coney Island dressed their countermen in clean white surgeon’s smocks to associate their brand with cleanliness.

By the early 20th century, the hot dog was fully American, and inextricably associated with another American pastime, baseball. Somehow, a mass-produced hot dog had become a symbol of American individualism. Never mind, of course, that both baseball and the Industrial Revolution have roots in Britain.

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Meanwhile, in Texas, another immigration story was unfolding, featuring a group of women known as the chili queens.

Like the first sausage, the origins of the first chili is unknown. But as Gustavo Arellano explains in his book Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America, by the 1870s a chili-and-meat dish appeared in San Antonio. As tourists streamed into the city’s plazas, they gawked not only at the spicy meat concoction but who was selling it: women. The so-called “chili queens” played up the romantic exoticism of Old Mexico and decked out their booths with lanterns and musicians.