Corn Dog: The Beef Wellington of Common Folks, On a Stick
Photo by Jim R Rogers
When he isn’t inspiring a worldwide audience with food porn, throwing things and cursing at contestants on any of his several television programs, or raking in millions worldwide in various business dealings, Chef Gordon Ramsey is proselytizing foodies everywhere to convert to the Gospel of the Beef Wellington. “Beef Wellington has to be the ultimate indulgence, it’s one of my all-time favourite main courses and it would definitely be on my last supper menu,” proclaims the superstar chef on his own website’s detailed page about his now-signature dish.
Beef Wellington. Photo by Prayitno via Wikimedia Commons
He isn’t wrong about the indulgence part. Ramsey’s version of Beef Wellington cranks the culinary catharsis up to 11 with ingredients like Parma ham and a layer of cooked mushrooms all wrapped in a meticulously prepared puff pastry and the finest cut of beef filet, with a sauce as rich as the rest of it. A meal fit for a conquering hero, foodie checking off their bucket list items, or well-to-do diners at any of Gordon’s higher-end restaurants who find that blood has just been shooting too freely through their veins and need something to slow it down a bit. It helps if their money flows just as freely as the calorie counter for such a meal, as the pricing of Beef Wellington at the Savoy Grill in London will run you 94 Pounds Sterling, or $120 odd US depending on exchange rate. But that is for two, and you can spend that and more on starters and wine in the 45+ minute wait you are advised it will take to serve it up.
Worth it? Absolutely.
Realistic for us humble folks? Absolutely not.
But that’s ok, since Wellington probably doesn’t haven’t anything to do with it anyway. In fact, the origins of this pinnacle of glutinous awesomesauce are actually very humble.
Wrapping meat in pastry has been a favoured culinary technique in many countries for many centuries- The Greeks were the first to wrap a flour and water paste around their meat to seal it before cooking, and the Cornish Pasty (the stalwart of miners’ lunchboxes) has been around since the 14th Century. However, the Beef Wellington most closely resembles the French filet de boeuf en croute and may well have been renamed the Beef Wellington after the Battle of Waterloo – rather than being a dish specifically created for the Duke of Wellington.
Now, you can go chasing the actual origins of the Beef Wellington down an internet rabbit hole of legends, myths, and really fun stories but the truth is no one really knows. Beef Wellington does have most of its similarities to French cuisine of encasing beef in pastry, and the humble Cornish Pasty (for the American imagination, think homemade hot pocket and you have a good idea what’s going on) does seem to resemble something that could be upscaled to the modern day marvel of chef excess. Really it’s the perfect dish for someone like Gordon Ramsey; a French trained Scottish Chef who gained fame in London before conquering America via television. Rags to riches, simple sustenance to haute cuisine, easy peasy lemon squeezy. Makes for a nice, neat, story arc, but the expanded universe of “pastry ensconced beef” is even more complicated.
Wellington was here in the states before Gordon, though. While the other side of the pond debates the who, what, and why of it there, the American theory of the case of wrapped meat is pretty simple. Recipes for “Wellington” are found in published form in the 30s and before, and by the 1960s it was reportedly Nixon’s favorite and was included in the White House cookbook. But mostly, Beef Wellington gained fame the way a great deal of European cookery was brought to the masses of America in that era, this time another foreigner who found food love in France and returned home triumphant, Julia Child.
But there was a domestic disturbance in the culinary force a generation before that, an American twist on the millennia-old tradition of dough and dead animal vittles.
No one really knows for sure, it depends on which version of the story you believe, but if you think the battle over Beef Wellington gets complicated the conqueror of Napoleon doesn’t have anything on pre-WW2 American fair food.
While the miners in Cornwall may have been stuffing whatever they could find in dough for their Cornish Pasty lunches for a long time, the quintessential common folk street food found its way to New York City via a German immigrant. It didn’t take long for Americans to figure out that one way to make a hot dog even better was to batter and fry it. A generation after NYC and Coney Island made the meat tube a staple, what would come to be known as the corn dog started popping up all over the country.
Widely popular by the time WW2 rolled around, who got there first is a regional war of foodie bragging rights that probably will never be settled. Minnesotans will claim the “Pronto pups” as the first, but don’t call it a corn dog unless you want it served with a side lecture on the cornmeal vs pancake batter debate. That “Pronto Pup” name also appears attached to battered meat on a stick at George and Vera Boyington’s soda fountain in Portland, Oregon at roughly the same time. Texans usually claim the Fletcher brothers and their “corny dog” the vaudeville performers sold as a side hustle. A drive-in in Muskogee, Oklahoma claims they created it to speed up cooking cornbread sandwiches and should be famous for both stick fried food and Merle Haggard songs. Then there is this Jenkins feller up in Buffalo, New York who might predate all of them by inventing a process to make corn dogs but not how to sell it and make himself famous, or any money for that matter. Then there is the breakfast cousin of the corn dog of pancake batter and sausage on a stick, or as my own children called in in their early speaking days “sausage biscuit pancake on a stick.”
Cornish Pasty. Photo by David Johnson via Wikimedia Commons
The point is, working class folks have been eating meat wrapped in dough, batter, or pastry for as long as we’ve had folks, dough, and meat. There is evidence the Egyptians took time out from building pyramids to deep fry stuff, and in the intervening seven-thousand-odd years to American fair midways plenty of meat-and-dough combinations have occured. From the Cornish miners’ Pasty to the West Virginia miners’ pepperoni rolls, such vittles have been a Trans-Atlantic food staple. Add a stick, a hotdog, and deep fry it and you got yourself something special, not to mention portable. Make it a beef filet and add French technique while subtracting the stick, you have fine dining.
So is it really foodie sacrilege to compare the vaunted Beef Wellington to the humble corn dog? Not historically, at least. Food has been, is, and always will be the product of inventive minds, whether they be in the Michelin-bedecked kitchens of Gordon Ramsey or the freezer section of your local Walmart. Meat in a dough is just good eats, and if there is a stick involved portable good eats. If you want to make it sound more fancy, you could always claim the stick in the corn dog is a metaphor for the stick Napoleon clearly had up his butt before Arthur Wellesley kicked it all over the field at Waterloo. It’s just as true as most of the legends of Beef Wellington and corn dogs, and as we all know, the story just makes the dish all the better, true or not.
No matter if you are dining in your finest at The Savoy in London, mining tin in Cornwall with a pouch of leftovers in the 18th century, eating a corn dog at the county fair, or even microwaving good eats on a stick just to shut the hungry kids up after school, hold your head high. You are the participant in a proud culinary tradition that spans from the most common of folks to the food elites, which can only be made better with knowledge and condiments. But mostly condiments. Knowledge dipped in mustard or ketchup is just weird.
Photo by Ocdp / CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
To me, beef Wellington is edging past Turducken and Surf & Turf territory, perhaps on par with cheesy bacon turtles (redneck turtle burgers) and other foods that should have been abandoned in the 50’s as indulgent, overwrought kitsch, like the period’s horrifying tuna, salmon, and sardine molded holiday Jello concoctions.
The corn dog, in contrast, has an elegant simplicity and an appealing axial symmetry. It’s not a meat, wrapped in a different meat, coated with yet some other meat, then breaded and sauced. It’s just an inoffensive batter dipped hot dog.Report
As someone on a blog pointed out, the basic idea of Working Class Food is “processed meat remnants wrapped in carbohydrates in such a way that you can eat the whole thing with one hand while walking back to work”, and corn dogs definitely fit that.Report
On Gordon Ramsey
I’ve had the “luck” (scare quotes intentional) of eating in several GR’s restaurants through the years, both in New York City and in London (neither a gastronomical backwater). From the first to the last, I’ve been severely underwhelmed. Part of GR’s shtick is to make simple food extremely well, delivered with excellent service. Of the three goals, I’d say the restaurants I’ve been in meet only one: simple food. I don’t recall anything that I could describe as , sophisticate, original, or creative, only seen in a GR restaurant. In no occasion has this *simple food* been excellently cooked: overcooked, undercooked, poorly seasoned, all that, yes. Perfectly done, not even close. And the servers might have mixed up the name of the owner with their own. Not being Gordon Ramsey themselves, they shouldn’t treat customers like GR treats cheftestants on TV, like we should be grateful the doorman allowed us in. After the fourth of fith GR restaurant, I decided it was not worth my time and my employer’s money to give him another chance.
BTW, I feel the same about Jamie Oliver’s restaurants, which I have tried in the UK and, of all places, Brazil, in that they are not worth my time and money. They are extremely overpriced for the supermarket market value of the ingredients. Having said that, JO restaurants succeed in doing what GR promises: simple food done extremely well. I think JO’s Italian based food is actually simpler to cook brilliantly than GR’s elaboration of British food, so it’s easier for him to deliver that part. But it doesn’t justify it being twice as expensive as the next best similar food in the location.
On Beef Wellington, I used to hate it, until I got it in a restaurant in a provincial city of Panama (David, if you want to know), owned by a retired Italian chef. I ate it in 2001, and it is still one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my life. Alas, that chef died in 2005, an I won’t be able to have it ever again. I think it is very difficult to make Beef Wellington in a way where the meat is not overcooked while the pastry is completely cooked. Tenderloin, which is what I’ve seen mostly used, is a very lean meat, and will dry very quickly if overcooked. Meat pies, Cornish pastries, etc. normally would include enough gravy or fat to keep the whole thing moist. Given my experience with GR’s places, I would never trust them to cook Beef Wellington without giving me a dry piece of meat, the kid apparently is de rigueur in the current White House. To me, overcooked meat is a cow that died in vainReport
The only time I had Beef Wellington I was on a ski club trip north of Montreal. Several of us were sitting together in the restaurant when the waiter told us there had been a last minute cancellation and asked if we would be interested in the nearly finished Beef Wellington at a discount price. It was excellent, made better by simply lucking into it.Report
Pasties. Anyone with a little Upper Peninsula Michigan heritage will have Opinions on them. And I do, as my mom grew up there and for many years we traveled there every summer to visit my grandmother and other assorted relatives.
I didn’t like pasties until I was nearly an adult – I didn’t like “mixed food” as a kid and I wouldn’t touch a rutabaga with a ten-foot pole (and yes, the One True Pastie has both potatoes and rutabagas in it. And I don’t want to HEAR about carrots as a vegetable in them).
The OG pastie, in my mind: shortcrust, like a heavier version of a pie crust, chopped beef (not ground), potatoes, rutabaga. The original pasties were probably just seasoned with salt and pepper, in my family we tend to use a few more things, usually allspice and thyme and put a little onion in as well. And we usually didn’t use leftover beef but bought and cut up some kind of inexpensive cut and cooked it in a frying pan with the onions and other stuff.
I’ve had restaurant pasties, my mom’s homemade pasties, pasties I made myself, pasties made in church basements and sold frozen as fundraisers. Generally homemade (or church-basement made) is best, I think it’s that they’re fresher and also the crust tends to be less cardboardy. (These days when I make them, I use a crust recipe from a Tourtiere – a French Canadian pork pie often served at Reveillon or New Year’s Eve. It’s okay, I have French-Canadian heritage too….)
Sometimes they’re served with gravy but that isn’t my preference. I guess some other parts of the country that had Cornish mining heritage knows them; I knew someone from the Bisbee, Arizona area who knew what they were.
I’ve been told that in the tin mines the miners would eat the pastie and then throw the crust edges down in the mine for the fae beings that lived there. Since their hands probably had arsenic on them, probably eating the crust where you held it wouldn’t have been a good idea anyway…I’ve also been told some pasties were made half and half, with the meat mixture in one half and jam in the other for “dessert” but I am not sure how you’d keep it from mixing and getting all gross.
(Cursed thought: an Uncrustable is a modern PB and J version of a pastie….)Report
I know I told you this already, Andrew, but I really really really enjoyed this article.
I’m not too proud to admit I eat a frightening amount of corn dogs. For some reason, I really like them and ever since we moved to the Basin where affordable restaurants are few and far between, and yet we have to spend hours driving to get anywhere, they’ve become my go-to since they’re easily available at convenience stores and grocery delis.Report
Thank you so much KristinReport
Corn dogs are good. Bagel dogs are amazing, but they seem to have disappeared. Googling for them turns up recipes instead of “You can buy this here.” Amazon has a non-beef sausage with cheese injected into it. (I am not making this up.)Report
You can find Nathan’s Bagel Dogs in your freezer section.
You will be disappointed.
But, hey. Sometimes it’s Saturday afternoon and you’re in the house by yourself. Two (or three) of those are less depressing than other things you could microwave.Report
Mmmm… bachelor chow. Now with flavor!Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhwtKx9MXZA
Korean corn dogs. Instead of corn they use wheat flour, and instead of hot dogs they use cheese. But the stick – the stick is the same.Report
The Illinois claim to inventing the corn dog (mentioned in one of the links as the modern battered and deep-fried corn dog) is to Ed Waldmire, who called his a cozy dog and set up shop along Route 66.
His son was well known as the hippy artist who illustrated all of those maps crammed with sites and trivia along Route 66. If you’ve been to a Route 66 tourist site, you’ve almost certainly seen his work being sold in the souvenir shop. Examples here. Bob was also known for traveling the Mother Road in his hippy VW Van, which formed the basis of the Fillmore character in the Disney movie “Cars.” It was originally going to be named “Waldmire,” but Bob didn’t want his name to be used to sell McDonald’s Happy Meals.Report
Yes he was in a long list of folks in the lore but just didn’t fit him in, along with half dozen others including a fun story about how German’s actually did it first but wanted to stick to the themeReport