Muskogee, Oklahoma, 1941 to Springfield, Illinois, 1946
There’s a place in Springfield, Illinois, called Cozy Dog Drive-In, that claims they came up with the modern corn dog. As Ed Waldmire, one of the founders of Cozy Dog Drive-In, tells it, he was in Muskogee, Oklahoma, sometime before 1941 when he had the most delicious sandwich at a roadside diner. It was a hot dog baked inside cornbread. The problem, as he saw it, was that it took too long to prepare.
He told his friend Don Strand about it, and Don, whose dad was in the bakery business, got to work coming up with a recipe that would become the modern battered and deep-fried corn dog. After years of perfecting their recipe, they launched cozy dogs in 1946. Would you say they really invented the corn dog, though, or just perfected it?
While corn dogs really exploded in popularity during the 1940s, when they became a staple at state fairs and carnivals, their true origins may lie even earlier in American history. Those cornbread baked hot dog sandwiches Ed Waldmire encountered in Muskogee were probably common across the South and Midwest, where cornbread was a staple. Even the stick and deep-frying probably weren’t new.
In 1927, Stanley Jenkins from Buffalo, New York, filed a patent for an apparatus to prepare what can only be described as a corn dog. In his application, he describes how his apparatus can be used for preparing all kinds of food impaled on a stick, coated in batter and deep-fried, including franks. Clearly, Stanley Jenkins was a genius, though he may not have been much of a business man. Even though he made corn dogs, he never thought to sell them.
If you find yourself at a carnival or amusement park, youll know a corn dog as soon as you smell it. Its got that meaty, salty-sweet aroma that wafts into the air when dough is frying and sausages are cooking. Its unmistakable, and its enough to make your mouth start to water instantly. The corn dog is an American classic, but unlike some other American dishes, this tasty treat on a stick has a controversial history.
In 1941, an Oregon diner named Pronto Pup was selling a cornmeal-battered hot dog on a stick, and then-owners George and Vera Boyington claimed to have invented it. Pronto Pup is still in existence today, the restaurant still claims to have created the original hot dog on a stick, per Minnesota Public Radio.
With most famous types of food, historians can trace them back to their genesis, but in the case of the corn dog, its complicated. Multiple people have laid claim to inventing it, and it all happened around the same time. So, who really invented the corn dog?
According to Bar Ss Food For Thought, the 1942 Texas State Fair was one of the first places the corn dog was seen. Vaudeville performers and brothers Neil and Carl Fletcher began selling their “corny dogs” at the fair, and these same corny dogs are sold at the Texas State Fair today. While a delicious Texas tradition, the Fletchers werent the first to serve a corn dog in the U.S.
Even further back is a patent for an apparatus for deep fat frying all sorts of foods that was filed by Stanley Jenkins in 1927 in Buffalo, New York, according to Food for Thought. While Jenkins mentioned frying sausages, he never moved beyond the patent phase. So, will we ever know the corn dogs true origin story? Perhaps it has many.
Corn dogs are really only wieners that have been thrust on a stick, dipped in a batter containing at least a little cornmeal (hence the name), and deep-fried to within an inch of their tubular lives. During the health-conscious final decades of the last century, corn dogs took a hit, since their greasiness, carbohydrate intensity, and shear hot-dogginess made them anathema to many diners. Yet they lived on at street fairs and Coney Island concessions — and in the supermarket freezer cases, though I don’t know anyone who’s ever bought them there. Eventually, “corn dog” became urban slang for a certain kind of louche sexual act, though no on can quite agree just what the act is.
Later, when I lived in Texas, I enjoyed “corny dogs,” as they were called, at the Texas State Fairgrounds in Dallas. Same treat, different name. The corny dog was introduced at the fair in 1938 (though some say 1942). The first drive-in to serve corn dogs, in 1946, was in Springfield, Missouri, and The New York Times remarked that there were corn-dog stands at the city’s beaches in 1947. You can still get a corn dog on the Coney Island boardwalk, but if the mayor and his real estate developers have their way, maybe not for long.
I got mine at a late-fall street fair near Union Square on a blustery Saturday afternoon. The thing had already been cooked, but the guy picked it up and threw it into the laconically bubbling grease, which looked like it hadn’t been changed since the Dinkins administration, making the battered frank so sodden with grease that the coating began sloughing off. Which is why I had to artistically apply the mustard, as seen in the picture. Still, it made a tasty afternoon snack, even though the hot dog inside is of the most dodgy and inferior sort, so pale it’s hard to imagine it contained anything that a reasonable person would describe as meat. Look at it this way: It keeps the cornmeal crust from collapsing.
When I was a little kid in Minnesota and went to the state fair, one of the main gastronomic attractions were corn dogs, and my brothers and I would beg to have one the minute we hit the fairgrounds on Snelling Avenue in St. Paul. Except they weren’t called corn dogs then: They were “pronto pups.” The pronto pup was introduced in 1947, and lays claim to being the first corn dog in the U.S. — along with about 20 others that demand the same honor.