The Best-Ever Vintage Hawaiian Punch Hot Dog Recipe

For a trip back to the 1960s try this recipe for hotdogs with Hawaiian punch. To me, it just evokes the era...

Hawaiian Punch is a fruit punch drink with 5 percent real fruit juice that is now owned by the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, Inc. Originally invented by A.W. Leo, Tom Yates and Ralph Harrison as an ice cream sauce in 1934, it was later made into a tasty drink when it was mixed with water. To read more about Hawaiian Punch and the mascot, Punchy, visit Hawaiian Punch's Punchy.

The recipe featured on this page was found online and is reportedly from a special Collector's Cook Book distributed with the July, 1968 issue of Woman's Day magazine.

Hawaiian Punch Hot Dog Recipe

Ingredient List:

2 tablespoons butter

1 tablespoon soy sauce

1 cup red Hawaiian Punch

1 teaspoon prepared mustard

2 tablespoons vinegar

1 teaspoon cornstarch

Directions:

Combine all of the ingredients together and simmer for eight to ten minutes. If you have a teenage son preparing the sauce tell him not to worry, the butter will melt in once you start heating the sauce. After it has simmered for eight to ten minutes, remove it from the heat. It will still be quite thin.

When you are ready to serve your dinner, cut each hot dog in half in a few places along the curved side. (This part is tricky, I blew it as the picture shows but apparently my teenage Boy Scouts know the trick so next time I will add a picture showing you the right way to cut the dogs.)

Grill the hotdogs and some pineapple slices together on a cookie tray brushing often with the baste. Wanting the hotdogs to hurry up and cook, I eventually removed them from the tray to get them to brown a bit more and to try to get them to curl. It was not until later that I discovered I had cut them incorrectly.

Serve the hot dog and pineapple slices on toasted hamburger buns. One of my sons ate his with the usual hot dog accompaniements of mustard and ketchup (hold the pineapple.) Another son, ate his burger plain with just pineapple and weiner. My husband and sister-in-law chose to douse their burgers with my Memphis baked beans. (That recipe, however, will have to follow another day. In the meantime, feel free to improvise with any baked bean you enjoy.)

I served my hot dogs with the baked beans and with coleslaw. Quite tasty considering I was serving hot dogs, one of the foods we try not to eat too often! However, they were a nostalgic treat and however you choose to eat your Hawaiian Punch hot dog, I hope you enjoy it!

Makes 1 cup of sauce.

(Until we get the recipe perfected!)

We enjoyed this recipe, although we ate it many different ways. From the photo, it is obvious that I have to work on the hotdog slitting in order to get the hotdogs to curl in a circle. As I stated earlier, my sons know how and next time, hopefully, that part will be done properly. However, the shape really had no impact on the taste. All of the hotdogs disappeared as did much of the grilled pineapple. They were tasty and the tropical baste was good and, I would say, worth doing again. We'll have to see what else we can dream of to use the baste for...

A Book Looking At 'Highlights' from Classic American Recipe Books by James Lileks

Check out the titles on some of this food...adult/high school ketchup pistachio cake. Meat pie with meat crust. Baked peppers with creamy marshmallow sauce. They fit in perfectly with this hot dog recipe with Hawaiian punch, don't they? If you are looking for some unusual retro or vintage-style recipes, this might just be the book for you...featuring lots of pictures, recipes, tidbits of information and tips from mainstream cookbooks from between 1940 and 1970, when "the only spice permitted in excess [was] fat.

Click here to see the wide assortment of Hawaiian Punch powder packets available from Amazon.