Red Snappers (not a fish story)

Recently, a friend visiting the island for the first time pointed at the meat counter in our local grocery store and exclaimed, “Whoa, that is pretty scary! Are those babies nuclear?”

Those babies being hot dogs. Eye-popping, glow-in-the-dark, neon-red hot dogs. Otherwise known as Maine’s red snappers.

Think Maine and native cuisine and undoubtedly cooked lobsters spring to mind. Or, perhaps, wild blueberries, our small, silvery-kissed gems of intense flavor scrappily surviving on boulder-strewn blueberry barrens and putting to shame their fat, comparatively tasteless high-bush cousins lolling in the sun. Sweet tooths unquestionably conjure visions of cream-filled chocolate Whoopie Pies as Maine’s best native dish. Sometimes likened to a more grown up version of Hostess Cupcakes (and no doubt offending numerous devotees), Whoopie Pie variations are legion, but all seem to require a sugar quotient guaranteed to make even the fillings in your teeth ache. But who’s to say native needhams might not toss the Whoopee pie from its top-most perch were more people to know about a candy whose main ingredient is (really) mashed potato? (Of course anything enriched with butter and shredded coconut and drenched in chocolate can’t be half bad.) It’s probably safe to predict, however, the unlikelihood of Maine’s Moxie ever getting top billing, except in a few select circles where gentian-root infused beverages tasting like carbonated cough syrup are the drink of choice.

But red snappers? If nothing else, in color alone, they are, let’s say, memorable. But I also have it on good authority that these pork (mostly) and beef dogs taste good.  And that they do in fact snap. “Seriously snap.” It's the result, I’m told, of the natural casing – if “natural” still pertains when a walloping dose of FD&C Red #40 is in the mix.

And just what’s with that red color anyway? Originally, some folks claim, the added color camouflaged a less appealing  gray. Others say the amped up color was to differentiate Maine-made dogs on store shelves. My theory probably doesn’t hold much sway – that given the ubiquitous Down East “bean suppers,” an eye-popping red weiner atop a pile of brown beans probably makes for a more appealing-to-the-eye-and-palate plate. Though, if we’re talking about the more infrequent and increasingly rare bean hole dinners, something involving a dug hole, hot coals, old truck tire rims, a buried pot and overnight cooking, then we’re in a different league altogether, one in which beans need no accompaniments except, perhaps, a mess o’biscuits.

Say “red hots” in my native Chicago and you’re likely to get (and in a more familiar brown hue) all beef Vienna hot dogs never served with ketchup but piled high with chopped tomatoes, mustard, sport peppers, celery salt and a dollop of pickle relish, the green of which, I’ll concede, can almost rival the red of Maine’s most famous links. Maine snapper aficionados insist nothing but yellow mustard does their dogs but a famous eatery in southern Maine drenches snaps in mayo and a special relish that sounds, from afar anyway, to veer dangerously close to a fast food joint’s “secret sauce.”

Never a dog fancier myself, it may be time to give the snap a test. If only I could get past that color.

Oh, and did I mention that in snapperdom, an acceptable variation of hue is megawatt Pepto Bismol pink?