Your Dirty Dawg

Fellow blogger H always makes me smile. And her latest post reminds me of a Venue panel I once wrote that made some readers sick ...

Remember the hot dog sellers who used to ply their wares around fairgrounds, markets and street corners, wafting the reek of processed meat, boiled onions and three day old brine wherever they went? According to various urban myths, the sellers never washed their hands (or worse, peed in the brine), the sausages contained traces of real dog and behind every rickety cart there was a gun-toting drug dealer laundering his dirty cash – now that’s what I call a recipe for the perfect guilty pleasure indeed.

Most commercial, mass-market hot dogs are made from mechanically recovered chicken mixed with pork fat, water, starch, salt, collagen and additives – mmmmm. They cost around 79p for an 8-dog can, and are conveniently available at 24-hour garages and Smile stores across the country. You can try Princes, Lancaster, Ye Olde Oak and supermarket own brand; lite, premium, vacuum packed or in a jar, but only one brand rules the pound: Plumrose - the original (probably) and still most definitely the best.

For the full-on experience, your lukewarm hot dog must be served in one of those generic, white, spongy hot dog buns (usually around 10p for 24) with a squiggly line of French (the brand, not the country) yellow squirty mustard along the top. Boil some onions in the brine left in the pan if you must, and – for total hot dog wagon authenticity – dump them on top of the bun with nicotine and pee-soaked fingertips, wrap the whole thing in a damp, greying napkin and charge yourself 50p.