Some Thoughts on the History of the Big Sandwich, Or Why You Say Hoagie, I Say Hero

And why Big Sandwich bread is better in New Jersey than New York

First, I guess should explain my terms. By Big Sandwich, I don’t mean a club or corned beef or triple-decker BLT. I mean, obviously-at-least-to-me, the Italian American-ish Big Sandwich with all toppings piled into a whole loaf of bread. If you’re living in the United States, you’re probably neighbors with at least one famous style, maybe the hoagie, the sub, the Dagwood, the grinder, the Zeppelin, the hero, the Philly steak, the Westchester wedge, the Miami sandwich Cubano, the Delaware Bobbie, the Maine Italian, the Chicago Italian beef, the Los Angeles French dip or the Louisiana po-boy.

I used to think the po-boy was also a bit French, invented by French-Acadian brothers who handed out French bread sandwiches during the New Orleans streetcar strike of 1929 to give out to those poor, out-of-work boys. Until James Karst skewered that myth in the Times Picayune, in his 2017 story whose title pretty much gives you the gist: “If po-boys were invented in 1929, how was Louis Armstrong eating them a decade earlier?” Karst found ample evidence that “poor boys” were first and previously served by Sicilian sandwich makers to Black New Orleanians, including traveling jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong.

Today New Orleans has all kinds of po-boys, including Irish (as in a roast beef with cabbage and debris), Cajun, also known as fried oyster or shrimp loaves, Italian sausage, hamburger po-boys, Haitian po-boys (with condiments like pikliz and plantains and mango sauce) and super-meta banh mi po-boys, thanks the Vietnamese who came to the city and surrounding fishing communities in the 1970s armed with their own distinct Big Sandwich culture.

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New Orleans might be the birthplace of most American Big Sandwiches, if you believe a newspaper article I found from 1962, by the famous twentieth-century food columnist Clementine Paddleford. Paddleford provided an historical breakdown of what she also called big sandwiches, by then already found in most big cities in the country. The big sandwich had been invented about fifty years earlier, she wrote, by Italians in New Orleans. It was “a workman’s lunch to be ordered from the local Italian grocer,” she reported. And an unbylined article that appeared via wire service across the country the following year gave a little more detail:

“Some say the ‘poor boy’ sandwich originated in Naples — in Italy where the crisp-crusted breads come slim and a yard long. Whole-loaf sandwiches in this country — dubbed submarines, Dagwoods, grinders or heros — have been traced to the waterfront of New Orleans in the roaring twenties when American jazz music was taking form and substance.”

The Big Sandwich could easily have roots in Naples, which is the home of a skinny loaf called a filone, sometimes also called pane Napoletano. Though there’s plenty of long-ish loaves in Italy, including multiple forms of pane Siciliano, and there were lots of Sicilians in New Orleans, too. Italian Italians, no matter where they were from, didn’t make sandwiches like American Italians.

Mario Pei, an Italian-born professor of language at Columbia University, wrote in his introduction to the 1950 American translation of The Talisman Italian Cook Book, that Italian workingmen “often carry a lunch consisting of half a loaf of good Italian bread plus a hunk of salame or a few vegetables.” In truth, it’s not really much of a mystery to make the jump from that to a Big Sandwich. PS — that book, written by Ada Boni and famous in Italy, where it was called Il talismano della felicità, was translated by Pei’s wife, Matilde. She added in a few of her own recipes that she had found to be “popular with her American friends, including pizza, yet another American classic gifted from the southern Italian region of Campania.

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I think the leap from a few lovely little ingredients to a pile of things on bread — raw, cooked, dressed and condimented — is one of the defining differences between European-style sandwiches and the American Big Sandwich, which has since been adopted by other countries. The other is the bread.

Though many people rightly complain about what happens to traditional breads when they become mass-produced in the United States, I argue that in the case of Italian/French bread, somewhat Americanized loaves are better, at least for our Big Sandwiches. But that’s not to say any American loaf will do — in places where Big Sandwiches are deeply woven into the fabric of life and are respected as things of true beauty — such as in the greater Philly–South Jersey region, across southwestern Louisiana, and any Vietnamese neighborhood — the breads used are soft but resistant loaves with slightly crispy tops and good flavor. Even the crappy ones.

These breads are not like their precursors in Europe. They would maybe not be that good eaten with only a little olive oil and salt and a few vegetables, and lack the bit of chew that usually makes good bread good bread. But they do not tear the roof of your mouth, they are easy to bite through, and they also don’t feel stale or crumbly after a few hours on a shelf. These are all a widespread problems with the average Big Sandwich bread here in New York City, where I have eaten Big Sandwiches for the past 21 years.

One difference in the Philly-Jersey area is likely because the bakers there tend to enrich their rolls in some fashion — with a fat, or milk powder, or egg, or even some dough-relaxer-type addition. That gives you the softness, a culinary instructor named Jonathan Deutsch told me. Philadephians also tend to deliver their breads in closed boxes or plastic, he said, rather than the open paper bags favored in New York, which can also help. The very best bakeries, he said, also tend to use a sponge method to make their bread, which usually yields that tiny-crumbed, extra fluffy texture. (BTW: The most famous po-boy bread bakery in New Orleans was not orginally French or Italian, but German. Food for thought.)

Deutsch is a professor at the Drexel University Center for Food & Hospitality Management. He grew up outside Philadelphia, taught culinary arts for many years deep in Brooklyn, and recently helped reduce salt in hoagie rolls made for institutions run by the state of Pennsylvania. So he’s studied the subject. Perhaps the biggest sign of sandwich greatness in a region like Philadelphia and New Orleans or Miami, he told me, is that “where matters.” As in, it’s a big deal which bread a sandwich shop buys — even if it’s one of the same three bread bakers everyone else uses too — “and you include that in your menu-ing.”

The average Philadelphian or New Orleanian or Miamian knows the name of the bakery behind their closest neighborhood corner store Big Sandwich, in other words. (In fact you usually see a box of them sitting somewhere in plain sight.) The average New Yorker? I think not so much.

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Okay. So back to the history: The first Big Sandwich may have been the Maine Italian sandwich in the waterfront city of Portland. According to family lore that is thus far difficult to prove or disprove, by 1903 Giovanni Amato was selling his family’s loaves layered with ingredients to men working on and near the docks. Today a Maine Italian is a still a specific sandwich that features ham, cheese, pickles, onions, tomatoes, peppers, and black olives.

So, to recap, you had Italians making Italians on the northeastern waterfront of Maine, and Italians making po’boys on the southeastern waterfront in New Orleans. Maybe it’s no surprise that by the late 1930s, you read about Italians making submarines near the waterfront in the middle, as in Wilmington, Delaware.

In a 1937 column in a Wilmington, Delaware newspaper, Wilhelmina Syfrit wrote that the hot dog “sandwich” (her words) was about to be usurped by the submarine: “This is a gigantic, and some think, artistic masterpiece of the culinary art,” she told her readers. She also referred to the sub as a “glamorous ‘snack.’” Hee hee.

Consider that all three places were swinging hot cities at the time, back when working waterfronts were still the heartbeat of culture (like, say, jazz musicians) and the economy, and those that worked in them often traveled between them frequently. In 1939, when reporter William P. Frank wrote that he wanted to get to the bottom of the name submarine sandwich, and his Italian American submarine sandwich maker said it came from an Italian American working nearby on a real submarine, who taught him how to make it.

Some say the name sub was created in Connecticut during World War II, replacing grinder, the preexisting Big Sandwich name, but dozens of Delaware mentions of the word sub at the same possibly disprove that. (I plan to research Delaware’s obviously great role in the submarine sandwich diaspora further, perhaps at the same time I deeply consider Thrasher’s French fries and the NIC-O-BOLI from Nicola Pizza.)

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The New York hero was also beginning to kick around by this point: In 1939 columnist Walter Winchell said the best thing to eat at Coney Island was “the Hero Sandwich (a loaf of Italian bread with ham and Swiss, American or Bel Paese cheese).”

In 1954, the New York Daily News visited the boardwalk yet again, eating heroes “crammed to the ears with either veal and peppers, juicy meat balls or eggplant.” Nice. Though my favorite reference is the 1940 Associated Press story, “Man Injured by Sandwich: Sam Kava was injured Friday by a ‘hero’ sandwich (peppers, eggs, half a loaf of Italian bread).”

Speaking of the New York hero, many assign the creation of the name to Clementine Paddleford sometime in the 1930s. At that point she was mainly writing for the New York Herald-Tribune, a paper defunct since 1966 and not indexed or easily accessible, so it’s hard to prove or disprove. But in NYC, you can sometimes find a Greek gyro hero, which sounds a lot like hero-hero when you pronounce gyro the Greek way. The similarity between the two words is said to be a coincidence, because the big Greek pita sandwich called a gyro supposedly became famous later than the big loaf sandwich called a hero… but I’m not so sure, given the long history of Greek businesses in Coney Island.

I’m sure you also want to hear about the Philadelphia Big Sandwich, aka the hoagie, aka an overlooked American regional culinary masterpiece. (I almost want to move to Philadelphia just for the hoagies.) For that we turn to the work of Howard Robboy, a linguist who has published two academic works on the submarine sandwich in the American dialect — and lives just outside of hoagie territory in the submarine lands of New Jersey. He is still the de facto Big Sandwich name expert in the country, and he’s done important work on the origin of the hoagie.

He has said that up until the late 1930s, everyone in the Philadelphia region still called them a submarine, just like in Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware. Philly was yet another waterfront city with plenty of Italians and jazz musicians, including Al DePalma, who was both. He eventually opened a sandwich shop in 1928 or 1929, according to Robboy’s research. Many years ago, DePalma told Robboy that hoagie was originally hoggie, because he thought you had to be a hog to eat one. In fact you can spot hoggie, hoggy, hogy, and hoagy in Philadelphia newspapers right up through the 1970s, usually in classified ads for a “successful steak and hoggie shop.” (Steaks, short for cheesesteaks, are usually said to be invented around 1930, also by Italian Americans.)

DePalma changed it to the spelling of hoagie, Robboy told the Bridgewater, New Jersey, Courier News in 1971, because that was the way everyone was already pronouncing it.

Robboy’s primary goal in writing his paper, by the way, was to show that the American language — and by association, our culture — hadn’t yet completely collapsed into homogeneous conformity. As he then proved by compiling the broad array of names (and by association, beloved regional variations that have only continued to multiply and blend with other cuisines and toppings and fillings and flavors) for what is essentially a whole-loaf sandwich.

On behalf of all Big Sandwich lovers out there, I am happy to report he’s still right.