Here are my three favorite ways to eat a hotdog – and these are in no particular order:
The familiar (and arguably definitive) hotdog on a bun.
Next, the hotdog sandwich. This involves bread surrounding one or more hotdogs, which are either split lengthwise and placed between two pieces of bread, or the simpler (one might even say more primitive) version in which you simply roll a piece of bread around the hotdog.
Then there is the perpendicularly-impaled weenie. This is the way I grew up eating hotdogs. You stick your fork right in the middle of it, dip one end in a condiment and take a bite; give the fork a 180° turn, dip the other end and take a bite; repeat until there are no bites left.
Now that my table manners are a little more polished, I have refined this method. I no longer pick up the entire hotdog on my fork but very daintily cut bite-size pieces as I go.
Now, as if the foregoing were not spectacularly spellbinding by itself, the really fascinating thing is that if I eat a hotdog on a bun or with bread, I put mustard on it.* If eating the plain hotdog one bite at a time, I dip it in ketchup.
Ketchup? What is that about? I put ketchup on absolutely nothing. I do not put ketchup on French fries. I do not like ketchup on meatloaf. I don’t even like ketchup very much.
Is the presence or absence of bread as a delivery mechanism the difference? Or is it just a throwback to my childhood?
If I’m really throwing back, then I should stop microwaving hotdogs and boil them in a pan of water on the stove, just like Mother used to do back in the day.
It should not go without saying that hotdogs are among my favorite things to eat. My father used to call them “tube steaks.”
Yes, very droll was he.
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*And occasionally peanut butter, but that is for another time.
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