submarine cartoon you were wrong to root

#Submarine cartoon you were wrong to root archive#

Instead, the real origin is more likely to go back to a jazz musician turned sandwich shop owner named Al De Palma. I'll admit, it's weird that hoagies, subs, and grinders would all have apocryphal stories related to dockworkers, but the dates really don't line up on this one. Or, another story goes, a mug named Hogan asked a coworker who was always chowing down on delicious Italian sandwiches if he could start getting the lucky guy's wife to make an extra for him every day, and the name somehow stuck.īut considering that the Hog Island Navy Yard shut down in the '20s, and 'hoagies' didn't start making the rounds in print until the '40s, that's fairly unlikely. First, it was a common Irish name, and became a nickname for the Irish immigrant Navy Yard workers, so like with 'hoggie,' they supposedly named it after themselves. Alternately, 'hoagie' is said to come from 'Hogan,' in two different ways. The Yard was located on a chunk of land once known as Hog Island, so the workers there were accordingly called 'hoggies.' This was an early spelling of the local sandwich, and the story goes that the many Italian immigrant Navy Yard workers ate enough of them to get the thing named after themselves. The first two, strangely mirroring the 'sub' story, start at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Hoagie: This is the home-grown Philadelphia term for the big Italian sandwich, and has picked up not one but four explanations for its origin. That throws a little doubt on the Paddleworth Hypothesis, since it's unlikely a bunch of armored car guards would just pick up words from the paper willy-nilly, but the underlying 'gotta be a hero to eat it' is still a strong contender. Barry Popik, on OED contributor and general food word expert, traces the word back to a 1937 Lexicon of Trade Jargon published by the WPA, which describes 'hero' as 'armored car guards jargon' for a big sandwich.

#Submarine cartoon you were wrong to root archive#

The real hero's journey began with the wonderfully named Clementine Paddleworth, who probably coined the word in a food column for the New York Herald Tribune in 1936, since the sandwich was so large 'you had to be a hero to eat it.' Since the NYHT went belly-up in 1966, there aren't any searchable archives online, but an enterprising food historian out there could go check out Rutgers University's microfilm archive to pin this one down for good. The odds that a New Yorker in the '40s would mistake a Greek establishment for an Italian one are approximately nil. And maybe more importantly, all of these sandwiches are essentially Italian creations. But the term is attested back to the late '40s, and Greek gyros only made a splash in American food culture in the '60s, and even that began in Chicago. First, there's the logical speculation that it's a warped pronunciation of 'gyro,' the Greek sandwich with spit-roasted meat. Hero: Native to New York, the hero has two main origin stories. 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:

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. 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? Rumors persist that he did this to facilitate all-day gambling sessions, but his modern-day ancestors insist he was just a busy guy.īut for Super Bowl weekend, we don't just care about plain old sandwiches. 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.