Ball Park Franks

America’s best-selling hot dog was invented to feed Tigers fans. In 1957, Detroit’s Hygrade Food Products — run by the Slotkin family — won the contract to be the sole hot dog at Tiger Stadium (then Briggs Stadium), and Hygrade’s master sausage-maker Gus Hauff reworked the recipe just for the ballpark: he added veal, made the emulsion finer, and supersized it to eight dogs a pound instead of ten.

Fans went wild, and by 1959 the franks hit Detroit grocery shelves under a name dreamed up in a company contest: Ball Park Franks. The Detroit-born tagline — “They plump when you cook ’em” — turned a stadium snack into the most-eaten hot dog in the country. The dogs were literally born at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and tasted best there: one critic who graded every MLB park’s hot dogs in the 1980s ranked Tiger Stadium’s number one.