Rhode Island Hot Wieners

A wiener is technically the same thing as a hot dog or frankfurter, but dogs and franks are often beef-based, with a garlicky flavor and a teeth-teasing snap that their casings give them, whereas a wiener is soft, skinless, bland and often pork-based. Usually a wiener is not at all my dog of choice, but when it's slathered with the meat sauce it becomes a "hot weener" and more than the sum of its parts, far from health food but cheap and satisfying.

In Rhode Island and surrounding Massachusetts they are often spelled with the "e" before the "i." It is called a New York System Hot Weiner, but has nothing to do with New York. The early 20th century Greek immigrant who invented it had come through Ellis Island on his way to Rhode Island, and was inspired by the evocative words "New York." Rhode Island used to have lunch counters on every corner and many of the little restaurants, with names like Wein-O-Rama, dotted the landscape like McDonalds and Burger Kings do now, and it is where wiener is sometimes even spelled "ie." Wiener is short for wiener wurst, the grandpa of our wiener, so the word wiener means Viennese and "ie" is the correct spelling. So I have no idea why Rhode Island's dogs are "ei," but who cares, they are so good that expatriate "Ro Dylanduhs" all over are passionate about their weiners, waxing nostalgic for them in Internet chat rooms, sneaking them by the dozens onto airplanes after visits home, and order the spice mixture by mail so they can make their own sauce out of state.

The hot weiner mystique is partly due to the fun way they're traditionally served; the counterman takes a whole bunch of them and lines them up along his arm-people often order them in threes. Then he dabs each dog with a mustardy wooden stick, slathers on the spice-laden sauce, then raw onion, then celery salt. I think the appeal is also partly because the sauce sits around on the heat 24 hours a day, drying out and requiring copious quantities of Crisco added regularly to keep it moist (not something I recommend you do at home, LOL). If you get your Hot Weiners to go, they are wrapped in wax paper and put in a paper bag that gets pretty greasy pretty fast.

There are a lot of varied recipes out there on the net for the meat sauce, most of them with way too many ingredients to be accurate in my opinion. We have to remember that these were created by lunch counter folk, there is not way they included a dozen ingredients. The reason there are so many variations is that the restaurants guard their recipes like it is the formula for Coke, most of them passing the recipe down to the next generation or to the people who buy the restaurant, they don't even share it with their employees. So, I decided to post the one I use down below. One more thing, besides using wieners instead of hot dogs, these are best if you steam the rolls just before serving. And PLEASE, assembly is very important to get the proper overall effect.