We all know the origin story of sandwiches: the 18th-century Earl of Sandwich, a wise man named John, started asking his staff to serve him meat bookended with bread to make for quick meals. Rumors persist that he did this to facilitate all-day gambling sessions, but his modern-day ancestors insist he was just a busy guy.
But for Super Bowl weekend, we don't just care about plain old sandwiches. We want foot-long (or six-foot-long) meat- and cheese-stuffed flavor bombs, those super-sandwiches we call "subs." Or "hoagies," or "grinders," or "po' boys," or "spuckies," or, if you're from Yonkers, "wedges." It's just one genre of sandwich, really, so why all the names, and where did they come from?
Well, back before big brands and big chains steamrolled "local color" into variations on beige, there was room for every American city to come up with its own name for a full-loaf sandwich filled with cold cuts, and most areas with large Italian immigrant populations did just that. While some of the names' origins are pretty basic, myths have swarmed to these sandwiches like flies on honey--so here, in no particular order, are the facts and fictions of our favorite sandwich's names:
Sub: An abbreviation of "submarine sandwich," subs are called "subs" because they look like submarines. Simple as that.
But the best myth puts the ground zero of subbery in New London, CT, around World War II. The city (well, technically the town of Groton, across the river from the city proper) is home to the Navy's primary submarine base and a large shipbuilding yard, both of which were understandably bustling during the war. According to this story, the big sandwich itself was invented by an Italian shopkeeper named Benedetto Capaldo in New London, but was originally known as a "grinder." Once the sub yard started ordering 500 sandwiches a day from Capaldo to feed its workers, the sandwich became irrevocably associated with submersible boats.
A nice story, but the OED's first printed record of "submarine sandwich" dates to a January 1940 phone book for Wilmington, DE, where a restaurant was advertising "submarine sandwiches to take out." Seeing as how we didn't mobilize for WWII until two years later, that pretty much torpedoes the New London legend.
Grinder: You're most likely to find one of these in New England, though the more common "sub" has taken over most of the terrain. "Grinder" shares some flimsy nautical roots with the sub--some claim that it was named for "grinders," Italian-American slang for dockworkers (who were often sanding and grinding rusty hulls to repaint them)--but the more widely attested origin is about the sandiwch itself. Subs, with their Italian bread and piles of fixings, were harder to chew through than your typical ham and cheese on white bread. That toothsomeness got translated into "grinder," since that's what your teeth had to do to get through a bite.
A note for nitpickers: at certain points in New England grinder history, grinders have been hot, while subs stayed cold, but that's come and gone over the decades.
