Self Portrait with a Chicken Parmigiana II

And they have written ‘TRADITIONAL HOTDOG £1’ on an A board outside a burger van on Oxford Road and I have stood and  stared at them, all slippery and rolling, and wondered at which  point hotdogs became ‘traditional’. Maybe the answer is in who  can claim host to the tradition, because in my mind a hotdog is as  American as pancakes and bacon, or a corn dog, or that purple pie  you see on cartoons. Did a hotdog become a tradition from the  moment American kids with caps started eating them on TV? I  know that frankfurters are German, and after Googling  ‘frankfurter’ I’ve found that the name wiener originated from the  word Vienna. Perhaps a hot dog has become a tradition three times  over. A hotdog is definitely a tradition to me in a sentimental  sense, if that’s possible. Like how, at school, they would mark most  Fridays with a hotdog for dinner. I would sit on a blue plastic chair,  opposite Louise Fisher, and admire the sense of celebration I got  from it, observe how the skin pinched at each end like the knot of  a balloon or a cat’s arse hole. I would analyse the texture of its skin,  the slight give and then pop as I busted through it with my front teeth. 

 Perhaps what I am saying is that tradition becomes a  tradition based on the weight of a moment, a kind of ritual, or  ceremony. Perhaps the sentiment of a hotdog only becomes a  tradition on Fridays, a traditional ‘Friday hotdog’. I have just  looked up on Wikipedia what goes into a hotdog, and one of the  three ingredients listed is ‘pink slime/meat slurry’. 

Perhaps both the weight of a moment and the repeated occurrence in time must take place in order for something to be  considered a tradition. For example, I have recently gotten into the  habit of locking my bike to an illegal railing every morning, but  I’m not sure I would call that a tradition. At the same time, when I  was seven, I accidentality broke a hamster’s neck by trapping it in a draw, which, though it is a memory that sticks permanently into  the bends of my smaller intestine, is not a tradition.  Perhaps it is not that all hotdogs are traditional,  but that the form in which this particular burger van makes their  hotdogs is in keeping with how a hotdog has most frequently (or  originally) been so. I’m guessing it would be far-fetched to  consider a hotdog that is made entirely from the white paste that  accumulates in the corner of a person’s mouth as ‘traditional’,  though I did once see mushroom ‘ketchup’ and black pudding  ‘dust’ be considered a part of a ‘traditional’ full English on Master Chef, and I’m pretty sure I remember Gregg Wallace loving it.