• Sausage Sandwich
• Sausages

Coney Dog

• Also Known As: Greek Coney Island Sauce
• Also Known As: Greek Hot Dog

• Source: Cincinnati Chili, Meat Sauce
• Source: Hotdog, Meat Sausage

The Greek American German Hot Dog

Few dishes capture the essence of the American culinary melting pot quite like the Coney Dog, a brilliant cross-cultural creation born from a German street food innovation, named after a New York landmark, and perfected by Greek immigrants using flavors rooted in ancient Mediterranean history.

A Coney Dog is an American frankfurter sausage, better known as a hot dog, served in a steamed bun topped with a savory, Greek-inspired meat chili sauce, mustard, and minced onion. The prototypical sauce is based on saltsa kima, a traditional Greek meat sauce spiced with sweet hints of cinnamon, allspice, and clove. In Greece, when this sauce is poured over pasta, the assembled dish is called makaronia me kima (literally "macaroni with ground meat"), where "macaroni" serves as the old generic name for dry Italian pasta.

In the 1910s, New York City was one of the main destinations for Greek immigrants, part of the first major wave of Greek migration to the United States, which they called Amerika. At the time, a great way to escape the summer heat in Manhattan was to take an elevated train to Coney Island to cool off at the beach, enjoy carnival rides, and eat a Charles Feltman's Coney Island Red Hot — a frankfurter in a long bun.

Although the majority of these immigrants initially settled on the East Coast, many single men journeyed inland to find restaurant jobs across the Midwest. After working long hours and saving their money, they went on to open their own eateries. In Michigan, they perfected the savory, thick meat sauce that defines the classic Coney Island Hot Dog. Meanwhile, in Ohio, Macedonian-Greek immigrants used that very same Mediterranean flavor profile to invent Cincinnati chili, serving it over mounds of spaghetti in a direct American evolution of makaronia me kima.

By the way, in Amerika a chili dog is a frankfurter served in a bun covered with Texas style chili, a thick meat stew made with beef and powdered chili peppers. While the word chili comes from the ancient Aztec language, the original Mesoamerican food wasn't a specific beef stew; rather, Aztec and Mayan cooks used wild chili peppers to flavor everything from corn porridge to complex stews made of turkey, venison, and beans. - AsNotedIn