In Eating Your Words, former New York Times restaurant critic William Grimes discusses what’s in a sandwich name — be it hoagie, wedge, muffuletta, Cubano, rocket, garibaldi, zeppelin, or spuckie. Region seems to dictate names as much as anything. Grimes attributes the Philadelphia “hoagie” to flapper-era Philadelphia jazz musician Al De Palma — who apparently said, “you had to be a hog to eat it.” During the Great Depression in 1936, he opened up a sandwich shop that sold what he advertised as “hoggies.”
Other sandwich names reference an ingredient or type of bread. Boston’s “spuckies” come from “spucadella” — a type of Italian roll. According to Grimes, muffuletta also takes its name from the Sicilian word for its round bread.
Although spuckies — along with rockets, zeppelins, and garibaldis — are on the wane, others from the same era have become ubiquituous. The po’ boy — served in D.C. restaurants ranging from Potbelly to Acadiana — was allegedly coined by two brothers who sold cheap, hearty sandwiches for workers from their sandwich shop on the New Orleans waterfront in 1921. Others believe that “po’ boy” originates from pour le bois, a sandwich in the lumberjack’s lunch box, or even from pourbois, a name for sandwiches made by the church and given to street kids.
Yet finding a good sandwich in whatever region is as tough as finding the ideal pizza slice in Washington, it seems. As Tom Sietsema reported in the “Simple Yet Sublime: Seven Great Places to Grab a Sandwich” in the Washington Post Magazine, “too many purveyors fall far short of the ideal.” Rather than pursue a sub, wedge, hoagie, grinder, or whatever the name, he tracks down sandwiches that speak to a region’s past — even if it’s not this particular region’s. The Cubano from Cuba de Ayer in Burtonsville, the corned beef sandwich from Deli City on Bladensburg Road, and the banh mi from Nhu Lan in Falls Church sound especially delicious.
Realistically though, most of us can’t trek to the outer reaches of Siberia on a weekday during lunch hour for the perfect sandwich. So what do you do? Please share with us what regional sandwich calls your name and where we can try one for ourselves.
