A hot dog is a kind of sausage, and sausages have been around a long time. The first known reference to sausages is in Babylonian texts from 3,500 years ago. Sausages were popular with ancient Greeks, Romans and probably European tribes, so people have been enjoying hot dog-like snacks for most of recorded history. People know a good thing when they taste it! The hot dog popular today was invented somewhere in Europe, but the exact time and place is still debated. The people of Frankfurt, Germany, claim it was invented there in 1487, which is where the name frankfurter comes from. Another story claims they were invented by a butcher who lived in Coburg, Germany. Then there are people in Vienna, Austria, who say the hot dog comes from their home town. Did you know that because Vienna is called Wien by locals, and that's why the sausages were called wieners?

One story says a German immigrant to New York named Charles Feltmann started selling dachshund sausages from a wagon in 1867. He served them in rolls with sauerkraut, and that, some claim, is the first real American hot dog. Another story says the hot dog bun was invented at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. A German immigrant named Anton Feuchtwanger let people borrow white gloves to eat the sausages he was selling, but no one was returning the gloves. Anton's brother-in-law, who was a baker, created some long rolls for him to use instead.There are a couple of famous stories about how frankfurters got the name hot dog, but historians say they just aren't true either. One story claims the name hot dog came from a cartoon by the sports cartoonist Tad Dorgan in 1901. The word hot dog started showing up in college newspapers in the 1890s, when franks were sold in wagons outside of school dorms. Did you know that In 1895, the Yale Record was the first to call them "hot dogs" in print?

John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, is credited with inventing the sandwich in 1762. The story goes that he was playing cards and didn't want to leave the table to eat, so he asked for meat between two slices of bread. The word "sandwich" was first used in a diary entry in 1762 by English historian Edward Gibbon. The name "sandwich" became popular and was used as a verb by the mid-19th century. The sandwich is considered Britain's "biggest contribution to gastronomy". Did you know National Sandwich Day is celebrated on November 3rd, the birthday of the 4th Earl of Sandwich?

When German immigrants began arriving in New York and Chicago, many earned a living by opening restaurants. Menus frequently featured Hamburg steak, an Americanized version of the German offering. It was often the most expensive dish on the menu. During the Industrial Revolution, factory workers were served Hamburg steak from food carts. They proved difficult to eat while standing, so one creative cook sandwiched the meat patty between two slices of bread. Sadly, the culinary innovator's name has been lost to history. There are a few names that continue to cross swords for the title: Louis Lassen in New Haven, Connecticut. Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen in Seymour, Wisconsin, Charlie and Frank Menches, Hamburg, New York. Have you eaten an original "Hamburger Sandwich"?

The hamburger seems to have made its jump from plate to bun in the last decades of the 19th century, though the site of this transformation is highly contested. Lunch wagons, fair stands and roadside restaurants in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Ohio, New York and Texas have all been put forward as possible sites of the hamburger's birth. Whatever its genesis, the burger-on-a-bun found its first wide audience at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. The vision of Edgar "Billy" Ingram and Walter Anderson, who opened their first White Castle restaurant in Kansas in 1921. the inspiration for other national hamburger chains founded in the boom years after World War II: McDonald's and In-N-Out Burger (both founded in 1948), Burger King (1954), A&W began offering hamburgers in the United States in 1963 with the introduction of the Original Bacon Cheeseburger. Dale Mulder, an A&W franchisee in Lansing, Michigan, created this burger, and Wendy's (1969). Do you order Hamburgers from.....?