Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Foods of the 500 - Friendly Franks


With May being the month most associated with racing here in Indiana, I thought that I would use my usual Wednesday foodie slot to feature the dishes many race fans might be cooking up over at 16th and Georgetown. We start off with hot dogs or, in the parlance of this 1941 American Meat Institute ad, friendly frankfurters. I'm not sure if the whole friendly shtick owes to the looming threat of the Axis powers in Europe and the Pacific, but I guess it's better than militant, angry frankfurters. In 2001 they would have been called freedom-furters or something equally asinine, so I won't poke too much fun.

Nearly forty years after Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle and the meat packing industry still was trying to convince Americans they weren't eating the severed digits of some poor slob working nineteen-hour shifts in a Chicago weenie-skinning operation.

The weenies themselves look pretty innocuous, just like the dogs you might get out of an Oscar Meyer package today, but it's the inset that I find disturbing. Exactly what is smeared on that hot dog? I think it's supposed to be mustard, but why is it smoldering?

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