Famous Nathan (12 page)

And a hundred feet down Surf Avenue to the west of the depot was Nathan's store.

The crowds spilling from the trains came straight out of Emma Lazarus's poem: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Whereas in the decades before, Coney had been a playground of the upper and middle classes, now more and more it became the province of the people, the Nickel Empire. The huddled masses endured the rocking, clanking, claustrophobic subway ride from the city. They emerged from the West End Depot yearning for … a frankfurter.

The train lines funneled thousands of potential customers every day directly past the store. The truism about the three most important factors in real estate—location, location, location—was true in spades for the fledgling frankfurter salesman. A restaurant like Nathan's lived and died by sales volume, and in the early years, volume depended in large part on foot traffic.

Subway riders left the depot and turned right—west—in order to reach Steeplechase Park. Straight ahead toward the beach were the sideshow attractions of the Bowery. Both paths led directly past Nathan's Famous. A left out of the depot and a stroll of only a couple of blocks would put the hungry visitors at Feltman's, with its sit-down restaurants, pleasure gardens, and ten-cent frankfurters. But why take the trouble when Nathan's nickel dog was right in front of one's nose? Who needed Tyrolean yodelers?

Nathan's, Coney Island, and the hot dog were elements of a massive cultural shift happening in America at the time. In the United States, newly arrived immigrants were gaining access to a standard of living that would have elevated them to the middle class in their homelands. The labor and reform movements contributed to a vast, ongoing democratization of society. The economy screamed into overdrive, racing ahead toward the ditch plunge of the Great Depression.

Jazz music, the automobile, and radio all emphasized the increased velocity of day-to-day life. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of Jay Gatsby's riotous nouveau riche mansion on Long Island. A new kind of “fast woman” debuted, the flapper, hinting at a broad transformation in gender relations and sexual mores. Prohibition—the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in January 1919—should have put a brake on things but only served to heighten the newfound sense of speed, illicitness, and danger.

Everything else was becoming faster—why not food? No one used the term “fast food” back then, but in practice, what Nathan Handwerker was doing on Surf Avenue represented a sign of the future. He had refined the quick-paced serving process to a science. Feltman's was a beer garden stroll. By comparison, a visit to Nathan's was a sprint.

With the new egalitarian atmosphere of places like Coney Island came a worry about lowering standards, a coarsening of the values of American life. Racial, religious, and ethnic biases played a part in this. In the nightmares of the WASP establishment, the whole country was slowly turning into a vast version of Manhattan's Tenth Ward.

Oddly enough, the hot dog became an element of the wider suspicions about rampant changes affecting society. The sausage—lowly, homely, often containing (gasp!) garlic—was deemed of suspect provenance, just like many of its consumers. Who knew where the population of the Lower East Side came from, and who knew where the ingredients of the hot dog came from? Trash people ate trash food.

It didn't help that lack of manufacturing standards and lax food inspection meant that sausages were oftentimes made from unhealthy, decayed, if not downright poisonous components. Lingering in the public imagination was the common German practice of incorporating dogmeat into sausage recipes. Horsemeat was another widely rumored ingredient. Meat-packers added sawdust and fillers to their products, regularly adulterating the links with formaldehyde and other toxic preservatives.

Upton Sinclair's popular 1906 novel,
The Jungle,
painted a horrific picture of meat production. The filth, sludge, and scraps from the slaughterhouse floor, Sinclair reported, were swept up to provide filler for sausages. The book had a hugely negative impact on meat sales in general and sausage sales in particular, helping spur passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.

“I aimed at the public's heart,” stated Sinclair, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” In the aftermath of
The Jungle,
sausages suffered from an unhealthful reputation. “Laws are like sausages: it's better not to see them being made” became a popular saying at the time. Like a lot of famous quotes, the source of that one is in dispute. It's widely misattributed to German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, but no one has been able to pin down a source conclusively.

Hot dogs aren't really even the subject of the law-and-sausages metaphor. Legislatures, so his parallel goes, are like meat grinders. Given the low approval ratings of politicians, perhaps sausages were getting the worst of the comparison. In a sense, the hot dog was reborn with the onset of the Progressive Era. A food that had become suspect now needed a rigorous reform of government in order to become palatable again.

Nathan opened his store a full decade after publication of
The Jungle
. He worked hard to combat any unsavory associations the public might have with the product he sold. He explained to worried customers that there was a law in New York State, stipulating that if horsemeat was used in a food, a sign had to be posted saying so. “No horsemeat!” Nathan pledged.

Displaying the beginnings of a true Coney Island sense of showmanship, he hired a half dozen hospital orderlies, dressed them in white lab coats and stethoscopes, and then posed them at his counters, wolfing down frankfurters. Another sign went up over his counter: “If Doctors Eat Here It Must Be Good!” The idea was that if even physicians ate at Nathan's Famous, it just had to be safe and healthful. Just because the store's dogs were cheap at a nickel, they were good for you and were never, ever made from inferior ingredients.

Nathan distinguished his product in another way, too. The Nathan's frankfurter was all beef, made from quality cuts, brisket ends, beef cheeks, and sirloin scraps. Down the way on Surf Avenue, Feltman's dachshund sandwich was made with a pork sausage. Nathan sold a frankfurter that was billed as “kosher-style,” meaning that while it hadn't undergone the rigorous, rabbi-monitored production of a true kosher dog, it was still all beef, never pork. In the public mind—even in the non-Jewish public mind—“kosher” was always associated with “quality.”

Another prime element to the Nathan's Famous frankfurter was its casing, made from sheep intestines imported from Switzerland. The casing served to concentrate the juices inside the sausage and lend it extra flavor. But there was also a delightful tactile aspect to using natural casing. A distinctive
snap!
came with the first bite. The sound itself became a signature of the store's hot dogs just as much as their all-beef filling.

Sticking with natural casing became a point of pride with Nathan, especially after frankfurters made without casings began dominating the market. The skinless hot dog first appeared in Chicago in 1922, courtesy of an innovator named Erwin O. Freund. Working out of Chicago's Union Stock Yard—the same sprawling abattoir infamous from Sinclair's
The Jungle
—Freund made an enormous fortune from the development of an artificial casing that could replace animal intestines in the production of sausages.

The skinless hot dog is not really skinless in that it begins its life encased in an artificial casing of cellulose. The casing is created in a chemical process similar to that in the manufacturing of rayon fabric. Freund accidentally discovered that when his artificial casing was stripped away from the sausage, the meat filling retained its shape. The skinless hot dog was born.

The new product might have turned out a little less flavorful, a little less succulent, since there was no casing to contain the natural juices. Gone was the satisfying snap. Manufacturers deemed the trade-off in ease of manufacture and shipping worth it. They were freed from their reliance on the variable supply chains for pig, sheep, and cow intestines.

Gone also was the tie-off at the end of a natural sausage. Every skinless dog resembled every other skinless dog. A standardized shape was easier to package, transport, and display. Once again, as was the case with the modern tomato, say, a certain amount of flavor and distinction was sacrificed to the dictates of manufacture and distribution. Machines require products to be identical.

A description of the process of making hot dogs details the modern-day approach, which uses a sort of thick meat soup for filler. “The emulsion is pumped and fed into a stuffer,” according to an industry trade group. “Shirred strands of cellulose casings are mechanically positioned on the stuffing horn. As the emulsion flows through the horn into the casing, the filled strands are linked into hot dogs of exact size.”

The cellulose casings, the description continues, are then removed from the hot dogs by an automatic peeler. In most high-volume sausage factories, the whole affair proceeds assembly line–style, contained within the confines of a single gigantic machine. It's efficient, highly sanitary, and closely controlled.

Nathan preferred a more traditional style of frankfurter. He remained fanatic about the purity of his product and vigilant about quality control. In an effort to provide only the freshest food, the store kept a meticulous log that tracked sales against weather conditions, so that frankfurters and everything else could be ordered on an as-needed basis. Nathan wore a lot of hats in his business, including that of a meteorologist. Working off his store logs, he could predict approximately how many hot dogs the store would move on a rainy Sunday in July, for example, as opposed to a sunny one.

The law-and-sausage comparison naturally leads to another aspect of the hot dog's reputation—its link to democratic ideals. It's a food of the people. Frankfurter consumption really took off after a watershed public event, the 1893 world's fair in Chicago. This was one of America's first truly democratic spectacles, with millions of people attending. It was like a coming-out party for the country's masses, and the hot dog was there.

At world's fairs and at the beach, portability was a major reason for the popularity of the frankfurter-and-bun combination. Essentially, consumers were offered a food—the dog—that came included with an edible plate—the bun. No utensils required. Portability helped at the ball park, too, further associating the hot dog with the great American pastime.

Frankfurter as a name for sausage came into the American idiom at the end of the nineteenth century, off popular wursts identified with Frankfurt, Germany. “Frankfurter Würstchen” has been a legally protected appellation since 1860, while the all-beef version, Frankfurter Rindswürste, came into being three decades later. Gref-Völsings, a successful Frankfurt butcher shop founded by Karl Gref and Wilhelmine Völsing, created the rindswurst in response to requests from Jewish customers for a kosher dog.

Hot dogs were “road food,” meaning food consumed or purchased on the road. The automobile and Nathan's grew up together. The mash-up between car culture and American foodways only become more pronounced with time. Nathan's Famous never needed a drive-up window, because Surf Avenue would function as one.

“Most of the food that Americans hold so dear,” stated celebrity chef Alton Brown, “things like hamburgers and hot dogs, were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.”

Peasant food. It seems fitting that Nathan, a peasant from the shtetl, was responsible for popularizing the hot dog in such a major way.

*   *   *

For much of its history, Nathan's sold a frankfurter made by the same manufacturer, a Williamsburg, Brooklyn–based company that eventually assumed the name Hygrade Provision. Nathan knew a representative of the business from his days at Feltman's.

“He used to give me a Christmas present when I was working on the frankfurters,” Nathan recalled. “Every year, he gave me fifty cents at Christmas.”

It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. The founder of Hygrade, Samuel Slotkin, born in Minsk, Russia, in 1885, was a gentleman cut of the same cloth as Nathan. “Mr. Slotkin's first loyalty was always to the quality frankfurter, and he used to order a side dish of them even when dining in nightclubs and fancy restaurants” read the man's
New York Times
obituary. “Early in his career he frowned on mixing meats in frankfurters and developed an all-beef frankfurter.”

Of the skinless frank, Slotkin was wholly dismissive. “It has no use,” he said. “All the use leaks out.”

At first, Hygrade didn't want to deliver on the weekend. “They didn't want to come the first year, because if they have to make frankfurters to sell on Sunday, and if it's going to rain, they'll be stuck with the returns.”

Nathan made a deal with the company to accept all the frankfurters the firm delivered, keeping them fresh in his non-patented ice-in-a-barrel refrigeration system. “Hygrade made the best frankfurter in the world and sold it to the best frankfurter salesman in the world,” said company rep Paul Berlly.

All the same, Nathan didn't hesitate to send back a whole shipment of product if they didn't measure up to his high standards. In those days, the supplier delivered the frankfurters in huge wooden barrels. When an order came in, Nathan would pounce, performing his idiosyncratic kind of taste test.

Pry open a barrel of franks, squish and squeeze, bite off an end, chomp-chomp, spew. Repeat.

“We were getting a load of franks in,” said a longtime Nathan's employee named Jimmy Bologna, recalling his first day on the job. “Out of nowhere, I see this old man in the kitchen. Who is this guy? He's just taking franks, and he's squishing them and putting on a scale. He takes a bite off the ends—chomp chomp—spitting out the remains in a little cup. Then he's opening up another box. And I'm just about ready to grab him, because I figured he's got to be a nut. There's a nut walking into my store! A nut! I'm going to get in trouble.”