Jewish FAQ:

Hot Dogs  
(In honor of our recent Swedish Days booth!)

Where do hot dogs come from?
We aren’t asking about what’s inside the super-processed meat —

that’s a question for another time–but, rather, where the food 
developed. Historically, hot dogs are descendents of German 
meat products like frankfurters (traditionally made of pork) and 
wieners (traditionally a mixture of pork and beef). According 
to one Chicago foodie, the all-beef hot dog was the creation 
of Jewish street vendors who might not have abided by all the 
traditional laws of kashrut, but wanted to offer their clients a 
pork-free meal.One of these vendors was Charles Feltman, a German Jew

who emigrated to Brooklyn, and began selling food on the 
Coney Island boardwalk in 1870. According to some stories, 
he was the first to stick a hot dog inside a roll, so that people 
could walk around eating their lunch. Others credit another 
(non-Jewish) German immigrant, Antonoine Feuchtwanger, 
for inventing the hot-dog sandwich. He used to give his customers 
disposable gloves so they wouldn’t burn their hands on his 
hot dogs, then switched to using buns instead.In 1916, one of Feltman’s employees, Nathan Handwerker,

left Feltman’s stand to start his own. Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs 
soon became a national franchise, spreading the all-beef frank —
and the neatly-compartmented hot dog — way beyond Coney Island.
 
from Jewniverse,  www.myjewishlearning.com