“Oh God, but remember how we all lost our minds the last time?”
~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief, Johnny Roosevelt
In the beginning of 2014, our staff undertook a daunting enterprise. We decided to write about every single submarine-type sandwich. Every damn one. It took us four articles and over 10,000 words to cover every sandwich we could find on anything that could be considered cylindrical French-style bread, which of course we referred to as being “phallic” and “kind of dick-shaped” over and over, because we’re classy like that. At the time, we decided to limit ourselves to submarine sandwiches, because if we wanted to talk about every kind of sandwich we could think of, it’d probably take like, eight articles and countless hours of research that still would not yield a truly comprehensive list of America’s sandwiches.
So, anyway, we have now just decided to do that last thing, because we’re gluttons for punishment. We’re going to post eight articles about American sandwiches. First, we’ll lay some ground rules so we only write about enough sandwiches to never want to look at a sandwich again, as opposed to writing about sandwiches until that becomes our identity, that becomes who we are now and forever, just sandwich writers, sitting in dark rooms, writing about sandwiches as our life force slowly ebbs away. Um. But yes. Ground rules.
- We are not going to include hamburgers or hot dogs on this list. We’ve done that before. A lot. You can read all the articles we obnoxiously linked to in this bullet point if you’re curious on the topic.
- Same goes with any submarine sandwich or a sandwich on a roll. We’re not double dipping here, folks, you can read that four-part series that we’ve linked at the top of this section if you want to find out about the origins of submarines, Philly cheesesteaks, Cuban sandwiches, and anything that looks even a little bit like a penis. Yes that includes lobster rolls too. Yes that also includes whatever sandwich you just said. Stop listing sandwiches, you’re talking to a computer, we can’t fucking hear you. It’s unbelievable that we have to point this fact out to you.
- Sandwiches with simple or basic ingredients are only included if there’s an actual story of it being created, as opposed to “eh, it’s food that people have put on sandwiches forever.” So we’ll talk to you about BLTs because that’s a combination that actually has a history to it. But we’re not going to talk about ham sandwiches or bologna sandwiches since that’s just what happens when you give someone bread and ham. Other sandwiches that you won’t see here no matter how much you beg—breakfast sandwich, pepper and egg sandwich, just about any sandwich that’s a single meat, anything that purposely tries to be vegetarian, and probably that sandwich you just asked about right now, seriously, you have to stop talking at your computer, your coworkers are going to think you’re weird if they don’t already.
- This is probably not going to be a complete list. Tough shit. Let us know in the comments if you can think of a sandwich we didn’t cover and if we think it qualifies, we’ll put it in one of these articles and probably not give you credit for correcting us.
So here we go with our first entry—classic sandwiches that all of America loves.
American Sandwich Series: Classic and Timeless American Sandwiches (Part 1)
America didn’t invent the sandwich, but they probably did invent the phrase, “Dammit, get me a sandwich!” which now that we say it out loud isn’t necessarily something we should be gloating about. Either way, the concept of putting shit in between bread as a delicious and somewhat portable meal has been around for ages, which has given us plenty of time to ask ourselves “what can we put in a sandwich” and realize that the answer is “well, pretty much whatever we damn well please.” In America, that’s led to various regional varieties, open faced versions, and general oddities that’ll be covered in full throughout this series. But as we’re getting started, we might as well focus on the classics.
Here we have some sandwiches that we can pretty confidently say are universally known and enjoyed throughout America.
Sloppy Joes
The Sloppy Joe has been America’s default ruiner of paper picnic plates since the early 20th century. If you don’t know what it is, you probably lived a very sheltered and frankly depressing childhood, but it’s basically ground beef mixed with onions, a tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and seasonings served on a hamburger bun that is guaranteed to only shovel about 55% of the meat to your mouth. Eating a Sloppy Joe is both delicious as well as the closest that eating food will ever get to being an actively Sisyphean endeavor. It goes by a slew of names, such as the commercially available Manwich, though we’ve known it as the Sloppy Joe since at least the 1940s, with its creation likely occurring in the 1930s. The most widely accepted origin story places the first Sloppy Joe in Sioux City, Iowa. Iowa has long enjoyed “loose meat” sandwiches (more on those in a later article), and the story goes that in 1930 a cook named Joe added tomato sauce to his sandwich and decided it was good enough to attribute his generic first name to.
Another story claims that the Sloppy Joe came from Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, which opened under a different name until Ernest Hemingway told the owner to rebrand it as Sloppy Joe’s. At the time, the Sloppy Joe as a sandwich didn’t exist—Hemingway was suggesting that they name it after Jose Garcia Rios’ Havana Club in Cuba, where the floor was always wet with melted ice and that was considered “sloppy” back then. They also served a loose beef sandwich, which the Keys location copied, and eventually decided to name it after themselves. While we’re inclined to believe that the Iowa origin makes more sense, Sloppy Joe’s down at the Keys does shell out about 50,000 of the sandwiches a year, and we’re guessing they probably take full credit for the sandwich on their menu, those sneaky fuckers.
Either way, the Sloppy Joe is a delicious and basic staple of American childhood, and an absolute devastator of shirts. No one has posited this theory before, but if someone told us that a powerful cabal of Laundromat operators actually invented the sandwich so boost their business, we wouldn’t bat a fucking eye. It is tasty as hell though.
Melts
We’re being pretty encompassing with this category—a melt is basically any kind of sandwich that’s got cheese that is cooked until it gets melty so it can intermingle with whatever filling we want to cram in there. A melt can be a tuna melt, a patty melt, a human finger melt, anything. (Except the human finger melt. Stop looking at your fingers like that. Don’t go down that road.) How is this that different than a grilled cheese? Shut up, we’re doing a separate one on grilled cheese later, that’s how. Also, a grilled cheese with fillings of, say, bacon in it is still mostly cheese, while a melt is a lot of meat with a lot of cheese melted around it, which you might recognize as two of the best things. You can pretty much put any meat into a melt, but the two that we’re going to cover that have the richest history are the patty melt and the tuna melt sandwich.
“But isn’t a patty melt technically a hamburger? What about your rules?” you might be asking, pretending like we have enough integrity to follow all of our self-imposed rules to the letter. Patty melts use a hamburger patties, but it’s not on a bun, and you could get away with just saying it’s a hamburger and cheese sandwich or, we guess, panini. The patty melt was most likely created in the 1940s in the California, served at the restaurants of Tiny Naylor (he owned Biff Naylor’s and Tiny Naylor’s Drive-In Restaurants). This mix of a burger patty, rye bread, Swiss or Cheddar cheese and grilled onions was most popular in the 1950’s, though they have remained classic standbys for casual dining experiences ever since.
The tuna melt is the second most common version of this sandwich type, though the history of combining toasted bread, melted cheese, and canned tuna is a bit murkier. While canned tuna first came out around 1903, it was generally served on sandwiches in its cold form for many years. The naming of the tuna melt no doubt was influenced by the patty melt, which as far as we can tell is the sandwich that created the very concept of making a “melt.” While tuna melts have been around since 1976 at the latest, one theory claims that the first tuna melt was made in 1965 in Charleston, South Carolina, after Chef Bo at the Woolworth’s lunch counter on King Street accidentally spilled a bowl of tuna salad on a grilled cheese, shrugged, and served it anyway. For those of you who know as much about sandwich origins as we officially do, about 50% of all sandwiches claim that they were created because a cook fucked up, shrugged, and decided to serve it to their customers anyway in the hopes that they wouldn’t notice, to have the customer say “oh hey, I asked for a grilled cheese, and you gave me a sandwich with tuna spilled over it you incompetent fuck, but instead of sending it back like a rational person, I’ll eat it and tell my friends that I like it this way.” It’s probably bullshit, or at the very least apocryphal, but either way, tuna melts became hugely popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and are delicious while pretending to be healthy (they are in fact very much not).
And while a melt can also be made with just about any meat—chicken, roast beef, ham, and turkey are all viable options—the important thing is that we have a toasted sandwich that’s just heated up meat and a shitload of melted cheese, which is wonderful. Good job, America.
BLT
The BLT is a simple but delicious concept. To make a BLT, all you have to do is get some bread, add lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise, at which point you remember that you were supposed to be making something delicious, so you get a bunch of bacon and put that on top of everything. They’ve been around since the early 20th century as an evolution of the tea sandwiches—small, snack-sized sandwiches meant for afternoon tea that were more popular around the turn of the century, probably because that’s when British things were the most fashionable. The BLT started appearing on menus around the same time as the Club Sandwich, which we’ll get to shortly. Recipes for BLT sandwiches from before they were called BLTs date as far back 1920, when a Tomato and Bacon Sandwich recipe appeared in the Calendar of Sandwiches & Beverages.
For a while, the BLT existed under longer, less acronym-filled names, such as the Bacon and Tomato, or even just basic “bacon sandwiches.” It’s unknown who first decided to call it a BLT, but it’s not exactly like it took some genius pioneer to come up with that one—most likely a bunch of people sort of independently were like, huh, this is a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich you say? Why don’t we just call it a BLT? And it sort of spread like a virus, or wildfire, or why can’t there be a positive descriptor of something spreading quickly?
At this point we feel the need to mention that the vegetarian version of a BLT is called the TLT. Tempeh, Lettuce, and Tomato Sandwich. That is bad, and you should feel bad if you’ve ever ordered one. Looking at you, entire southern portion of the state of California.
Pulled Pork
Listen, we know, there are a lot of directions that barbeque sandwiches can go, and no we’re not going to cover all of them. And while the origin of the pulled pork sandwich basically mirrors the origin of pulled pork, and even that is a hazy bunch of “well different places in the South do it differently” folklore, we’re going to talk about this, because a pulled pork sandwich is fucking wonderful and you’re not our editor, and also our editor is drunk right now so we can get away with this hackery.
Pulled pork is basically any tough cut of meat that’s slowly cooked at a low temperature until the meat becomes tender enough to be pulled apart into smaller pieces. This is typically done through a smoking method, though there are non-barbecue methods at your disposal if you want to use a slow cooker or an oven. A pulled pork sandwich typically requires the aforementioned meat, preferably with some barbeque sauce of some kind. A full history of the pulled pork sandwich would involve an in depth discussion of barbeque that we’re frankly not qualified to weigh in on—slow cooking meat became one of the earliest barbeque techniques used by Spanish settlers in the United States, and pork became the animal of choice for many because pigs are delicious and the layout and climate of the Southern colonies were ideal for raising hogs, and from there it splinters into hundreds of approaches and variations.
Just know that as long as we’ve pulled pork and doused it in barbeque sauce, we’ve been putting it on sandwiches. The sandwich is really the most convenient way to eat this sloppy mess, and since the meat comes off in strips, as opposed to the ground beef in a Sloppy Joe, you’re less likely to end up with half your meat on your plate afterwards. Oh, it’s also incredibly delicious, and uniquely American, so it’s got that going for it as well.
Club Sandwich
The Club Sandwich hatched into existence around the same time as the BLT, and really the only difference between the Club and the BLT is one single ingredient, as well as an affinity for toothpicks. If you take a BLT and add sliced poultry (it used to be chicken, but now turkey is more common), put a third slice of bread in the middle, stab the whole thing with a splinter of wood, cut it into quarters then boom, you have a Club Sandwich. While we’d like to believe that Mitch Hedberg’s theory is correct, the most commonly cited origin claims that the recipe appeared in 1894 at the Saratoga Club-House, a gentlemen-only gambling house in upstate New York. This is the same club that claims to have invented the potato chip, for those of you who keep track of such things. At the very latest, there are menus (from Rhode Island, no less) from 1899 that show that the Club Sandwich has been served at least that long, so the 1894 timetable makes plausible sense.
The Club Sandwich started off as a standard sandwich, while the layered three-slices-of-bread-per-sandwich that requires a toothpick to keep everything in place came into popularity later on. The first printed recipe of a Club Sandwich, in 1903, called for two slices of bread, but by 1929 we were already calling for sandwiches that had between one and five “stories” or extra layers of bread, because this is America and if we can make a sandwich into something needlessly silly and excessive you damn well know we’re going to do that.
So there you have it, the first five of our dozens of sandwiches we’re going to half-tell you about. Stay tuned for later in this week for part two of our focus on timeless and classic American sandwiches, and if you want to make sure we remember to include your favorite sandwich, tough luck, we’re not going to talk about ham and cheese sandwiches, you need to consider trying less boring sandwiches.
