Are Maine’s Famous Red Snapper Hot Dogs Based on a British Sausage?

In my lifetime, I've probably eaten my weight in red snappers.

It's funny, when I was young, I thought all the other hot dogs were the weird ones. I thought brown hot dogs were so strange. To the point where I didn't even want to eat them. But you know, age and maturity bring wisdom when it comes to food colors, haha.

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There are plenty of urban legends about them, and all sorts of opinions as well. Most Mainers won't even acknowledge the existence of another hot dog. We defend them with every fiber of our being, as though they were our complete identity. But what if I told you, that red snappers may actually owe their existence to... the British?

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Red snappers may be a direct descendant of the saveloy.

So there's little sausage they all love over across the pond, called the saveloy. It's a little pork stuffie, that you'll find in most fish & chip shops around Britain. As far as what's in it for spices and such, it all seems pretty close to what we'd see. Maybe a bit more herbal. But just like us, they boil them and eat them that way most often.

They also use them up in curries and things like that. But I noticed on two different sites on my search, that both compared them directly to what we know as red snappers. So there must be something to it. All this time, we've thought this was our legacy, and it's basically just a ripoff of Britain?! Wth?! Here watch this guy eat one...

But that's not all...

It's possible that not only is the saveloy the precursor to our beloved red snappers, they say it could be the grandfather of the corn dog as well. It's said that other than boiling, that the other most popular preparation method is to batter them up and deep fry them. So it seems that all our favorite, most "American" foods, are just British knockoffs.

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I mean, it's food. Most recipes are simply a reinterpretation of something else. It's rare when you come across a recipe that's never been done before. And let's be real... Our early American ancestors all pretty much came from Europe. so it's not a big stretch that we ripped of their little hot dog. But I guarantee we perfected it.

How many of these have we ripped off? Or are these American originals?