The “Bulletin”

West Roxbury / Roslindale, Massachusetts

Published originally in the West Roxbury/ Roslindale Ma “Bulletin” Sept 2002 Updated in Jan. 2004

Recollections of the past

“Submarine Sandwiches”

By Hank Brandli (Melbourne, Fl)

Looking back on Boston and Rozzie from my home in Florida, one of the fond memories I have of “Bean Town” and the Back Bay is the fascinating food in and around that city, especially submarine sandwiches; also known as grinders, heroes, hoagies, Italian sandwiches, po’boys and muffalettas.***

In every small section of the city, there were submarine sandwich shops; Italian sub-marine sandwiches, or whatever, and these ran the whole gamut from meatball subs to sausage subs to Italian cold-cuts. Even on Friday there would be tuna fish subs or pepper and egg subs to cater to the heavy Catholic population of the area.

These sandwiches were all good tasting and nourishing. And, above all they were all reasonable. In those days of the mid 50’s and 60’s a good sub would cost maybe 25 or 30 cents and you could get it covered with all of the ingredients – tomatoes, lettuce, pickles, onions, peppers, salt, pepper, olive oil, etc.

The bread, however, was the key ingredient. Not all submarine sandwich places had good quality bread, French or Italian. Actually the French bread, certain French bread was the best. Better tasting and it was chewy. It gave your jaws exercise and it tasted delicious. Along with those succulent sauces mingled together with the cold-cuts, the lettuce, the tomatoes and the olive oil, it really made your saliva glands work overtime as well as your jaw muscles. Coupled with a soft drink, coke, orange soda, etc., it was the perfect lunch or other meal of the day. My favorite supplementary drink was a Fanta Orange or an Orange Crush. Everybody though had their different liquid beverage. My father loved a beer with his sub.

In Florida, there is a different story. There are a lot of local small submarine sandwich places and chain stores such as Subway and Mash Hogies, but they suffer from what I was brought up on. The reason for this is the bread! The bread down here in the deep South just crumbles all over the place – in your hand, on the table, on the counter. It’s just not chewy and lacks texture. It is very flat, almost like the bread you buy at supermarkets. Maybe, it’s the water here.

 
 My Canadian friend, Helen, a wonderful cook and baker has a theory about the bread down here...humidity! 
She says “It kills a hard crust”.
 No joke, she always said the same thing about the bread in Canada. In fact, when she first moved here she used to have Isobel, a friend from Canada, send her loaves of Hovis bread. 
”It was the most unbelievable bread”, she says.
Her mom also believes it is the flour. The bread flour with a lot of gluten
or a hard wheat make a better bread. We don't see that bread very often. Maybe the combination of hard wheat with less humidity is the better combo?

The cold-cuts here are terrific though (probably because they are shipped in from New England!) and the vegetables are alright, except for the tomatoes. You just can’t beat good New England tomatoes. Most tomatoes in the south are soft and tasteless. I get the feeling they are chemically treated. But most of all is the terrible lack of good quality bread and, of course, the costs now-a-days are astronomical. A good sub-marine in Florida costs anywhere from $5 to $7 bucks.

Now, I realize that Boston subs are also more expensive than they were in those good old days of the 40s and 50s and it shocks me. We have an increase in price faster than the cost of a new car or a new home or a new television. The price of cold-cut meats, capicolla, prosciutto, bologna, ham, (especially that sliced in the delicatessen), has gone sky high. It is so expensive that instead of charging you by the pound if you buy it separately, they charge you by the ¼ pound.

In those good old days, we used to make our own subs in our Rozzie home. We would go down to Tedesco’s market on the corner of Washington St. and Averton St. buy some sub-rolls which consisted of long, French bread, about 20 to 24 inches in length. Those would cost 11 cents a piece; then, we would pick up some capicolla, bologna, Genoa salami, prociutto, ham, provolone cheese and of course the necessary ingredients of vegetables and pure olive oil. We would then go home, slice the bread, load it up with the cold-cuts and the lettuce and the various peppers, and the tomatoes and the onions, sprinkle salt and pepper generously on it and pour a little bit of the pure olive oil and voila, we would have a delicious sub-marine sandwich that was very reasonable. Sometimes on those hungry winter days we would have two.

Back then, the price of bologna and other cold-cuts was under 50 cents a pound and it was a good pound, an honest pound. A pound where the butcher man would throw it on the scale, weigh it up right in front of you, roll it up in those beautiful off-white cellophane papers, slap some tape on it to seal it, put the price on it and you would pay for it and leave. None of this pre-package bubble-wrap stuff we get now-a-days loaded with preservatives and sometimes kind of slimy when you to struggle to even open it up. Who needs that?

Another great sandwich we had once a month or so involved braunsweiger wrapped

in a natural casing ( ? ).We cut thin slices removed the skin and put the circular meat pieces overlapping on dark rye Kasanof’s rye bread .The loaf was tapered at both ends. Then, Gulden’s mustard was spread in ample supply on the meat along with a slice of Bermuda onion .We ate the a whole loaf made up into these different sized sandwiches. Cain’s bread and butter pickles were a key condiment that went well with this lunch. Dad always drank bottled beer, Dawsons or Shaefers. I usually drank soda usually Orange Crush or Pepsi.

Sometimes when no rye bread was available we spread the braunsweigwer on Ritz crackers sans mustard.

Submarine sandwiches have come a long way in cost and unfortunately have gone down hill a lot in quality. And, some new varieties have been added like veal parmigiana, chicken teriyaki, turkey, Philly Cheese Steak, chicken-bacon, pastromi, etc.

Locally, we do have a fairly good sub place within the national supermarket chain Publix Deli. It has pretty good cold cuts, excellent provolone cheese and fairly fresh vegetables. Same old southern tomatoes, however. And the bread is better than most local sub places, but not as good as I remember. What has happened to the quality of bread? Even way back when my parents stayed with me on their yearly trips from Boston, they informed me that up North the quality of bread had gone down hill. They just can’t make the breads that we used to have with our submarine sandwiches.

Sometimes in the Boston School lunch program systems they would make a so-called submarine out of bread, bologna and mustard and called it a “bologna spuckie”. This simple meal was very famous in the school system lunchrooms. My Aunt worked in the Mayor James E. Curley School in Jamaica Plain and she used to pride herself on her lunchroom bologna spuckies. In those days, you could get them for 10 cents and with a school lunch plate of beans and your 5 cent milk you really had one heck of a meal to keep you going on those cold winter days.

Those recollections are great. The kids today won’t ever have some of these good memories of the past. Could it be that when they are looking back to write a recollection of their past 50 years from now that sub-marine sandwich will cost $10 or $15? And they will recall the ones now as being good? When in reality, the ones in Rozzie that I had as a kid were the “piece-de- resistance” whether bought in the local sub-section of the back bay area, or made on a Saturday morning at home.

*** Muffalettas

The hefty sandwich melds distinct flavors into a gustatory gut-buster

By Lorraine Smorol via Google on the internet

If you ever get to New Orleans, head to the Central Grocery for a muffaletta, a succulent, savory sandwich created in 1906 by Sicily native Salvatore Lupo. Not for the fainthearted, the muffaletta (which in Sicilian translates as a round, hollowed-out loaf of bread) includes the Italian deli meats sopressata, a hard, salty salami, and mortadella, a bologna with pistachios, plus provolone cheese, all sliced thin.

The bread is halved horizontally, with the insides scooped out to create a cavity into which goes a layering of the meats and cheeses plus chopped arugula and sun-dried tomatoes. But not before the crucial ingredient, a spread made from marinated black and green olives, garlic, oregano and roasted red peppers, is brushed on both halves of the bread. A brick or other heavy object, placed on top of the filled bread for at least 30 minutes, melds the ingredients.

Over the last 50 years, regional variations of such layered gut-busters have grown in popularity think bomber, grinder, wedge, zeps, hoagie, hero or subs. The grinder, for instance, appeared around 1954 in New England. The term referred to the amount of grinding needed to work one's way through the sandwich. Another New England variation, the submarine sandwich, reputedly was the creation of Benedetto Capaldo, a Groton, Conn., grocer who named his sandwich during World War II for a nearby submarine base.

Hoagie also carries a geographic origin. The sandwiches eaten by Italian immigrants who worked on Hog Island in Delaware County, N.J., became known as hoagies. Across the Delaware River, South Philadelphia also claims credit; legend has it that Antoinette Iannelli named the sandwiches for policemen and shipyard workers also at Hog Island.

Another such stuffed-sandwich variation is the Po'Boy, also with “Nawlins” roots, and named at the turn of the 19th century when a streetcar strike prompted the owners of the Martin Brothers Grocery to offer inexpensive sandwiches to the strikers. Cheap they may be, but they sound pretty tasty: French bread stuffed with deep-fried oysters, plus tartar sauce, lettuce and tomatoes.

Variations included fried catfish, New Orleans andouille sausage, fried eggs, chicken salad and even pan-roasted beef and gravy stuffed into the crusty bread and served warm.

And the hero sandwich was apparently named by 1930s food writer Clementine Paddleford, who said that one had to be a hero to be able to dig into and consume the multilayered creation. An urban legend tells of a hero maker who wrapped his sandwiches in cloth towels and invited children to sit on them in the car on the way to a picnic so that the ingredients would be pressed together.

Sort of brings new meaning to the phrase bottom line, doesn't it?

THE END