When King George VI of Great Britain visited American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939, war was looming in Europe. But for one brief moment, all that mattered was hot dogs.
The king and his wife, Queen Elizabeth (mother of the current queen), had traveled across the Atlantic for an official state visit, with an itinerary that included a trip to the Roosevelt family estate in Hyde Park, New York, where First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had planned a picnic lunch. It was an intentionally informal affair that swapped the White House dining room and champagne toasts for a countryside porch and casual conversation—including instructions on how, exactly, to eat the meal’s centerpiece.
“The king looked at the hot dog and said, ‘What should I do?’” the Roosevelts’ son James recounted years later. “My father said, ‘Put it in your mouth and keep chewing until you finish it.’”
This wasn’t the first time the Roosevelts had hosted such a meal for world leaders—they had served hot dogs when Crown Princess Louise of Sweden visited Hyde Park in 1938. But the picnic with British royalty turned into a media frenzy. Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic reported every detail: the paper plates, the royals ditching their usual protocol and shaking hands with guests, Eleanor Roosevelt’s casual attire of “an old rose and white cotton sport suit,” the fact that King George asked for seconds and washed it all down with beer.
The menu also included Boston brown bread and strawberry shortcake, but it was the hot dogs that made headlines. In the years that followed, they became the central feature of the collective memory of the event, mentioned in obituaries when King George VI died in 1952 and in news coverage when the Hyde Park residence went on the market in 1968.
But the event had a larger legacy. It kickstarted an enduring tactic of American international relations: hot-dog diplomacy.
As the Roosevelts seemingly understood, the central and overlapping selling points of a hot dog—beyond being tasty—are convenience, informality, and adaptability. They’re simple, handheld foods that you can eat by themselves or gussy up in an infinite number of ways. The National Hot Dog and Sausage Council counts 18 regional variations, though surely there are more, each representing distinct cultural identities and traditions. But at their core, each hot dog is still merely and magnificently the same thing, and maybe the closest the United States has to a national dish.