To our knowledge, no one has catalogued all the sandwiches in America made on tubular lengths of bread, and there is no complete dictionary to explain their names. Some are so distinct they are a separate category altogether: French dip, Italian beef, po’ boy, banh mi, Cuban sandwich. Others contain familiar ingredients and have names that need little explanation: a zep (western Pennsylvania) resembles a zeppelin; likewise, a torpedo (the Bronx) is shaped like a torpedo. But even some obvious names might be tricky.
Garnishes are vital in a Delaware Valley hoagie.
Take the sub or submarine, known throughout the Delaware Valley. The common and seemingly logical story is that they were named after the long, loaf-shaped ships of the silent service during World War II. But Tom LaRocca, longtime employee of the venerable White House Sub Shop in Atlantic City, offered another perspective: “Atlantic City said ‘submarine’ long before this place opened [in 1946],” he told us, explaining that the length of bread used to make the sandwich was always known as a sub. “Because it is not a full-size loaf. It is sub-sized, like a compact car.”
Philadelphians call the same sort of sandwich a hoagie. One explanation is that Italian workers at the city’s shipyard, known as Hog Island during the first World War, brought bunned lunches that became known as Hog Island sandwiches, and eventually hoagies. Most sandwich shop menus in the city offer both cheese steaks and hoagie cheese steaks, the latter including lettuce and tomato along with steak and cheese, but the classic hoagie (known in many places throughout the east simply as the Italian special), is strata of capicola, salami, and provolone with chopped iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and raw onions, a good drizzle of oil, and—optionally—roasted peppers, either sweet or fiery long hots. Some contend that hoagies always are cold or at least contain cool lettuce and tomato, whereas subs are hot; but the lines between the two are indistinct.
One of the least satisfying explanations afloat for a commonly used term is that people in Westchester County, New York, call their long sandwiches (hot or cold) wedges because, once assembled, the sandwich is cut on an angle and is therefore wedge-shaped. Likewise, the sandwich known as a grinder throughout southern New England is supposed to have gotten its name because one must grind one’s teeth to eat it. Those theories will have to do until a substantiated account is uncovered.
At least the prevailing New York word for the sandwich has a solid source. In 1936, Herald Tribune food writer Clementine Paddleford observed Italian working men eating very large sandwiches from their lunch boxes and referred to them—the men as well as the sandwiches—as heroes.