Sausage Sandwich (Texas BBQ)
At Kreuz Market in Lockhart and Southside in Elgin, the smoked beef sausage link arrives on butcher paper with two slices of white bread. The bread soaks fat. The link does the work.
Andrew Lekashman
Sausage Egg and Cheese
The sausage version runs on a manufactured object: a pre-formed, sage-and-pepper pork disc built to hold height and season a whole layer, standardized nationally by a fast-food chain in the mid-1970s.
Sausage Biscuit
A sage-and-pepper pork patty, griddled and slid into a split buttermilk biscuit. The sausage biscuit is the Southern breakfast counter at its plainest, and the patty, not the bread, drives it.
Sausage and Peppers Hero
Sausage browns first, peppers cook down in the fat it leaves behind, and a roll catches both. A Feast of San Gennaro staple since the 1920s, still sold off the same Mulberry Street griddles.
Salvadoran Pupusa
A ball of corn masa opened, stuffed with cheese, beans, or seasoned pork, then sealed and griddled into one round. El Salvador's national dish, and a fixture of Los Angeles, Washington, and Houston.
Salt Potato Sandwich
Syracuse-style salt potatoes mashed on bread; local curiosity.
Salmon Burger
Salmon is too lean to hold a patty, so the salmon burger is an engineering job: a third blended to paste to glue thumbnail-chopped chunks, bound with egg and crumb. The Pacific Northwest standard.
Salmon Burger (Alaskan)
In Alaska the salmon burger tracks the run calendar: sockeye and coho worked into a bound patty, seared and folded into a toasted bun. A state that wrote wild salmon into its constitution.
Sacramento Squeeze Burger
A smash burger with a frico ring: a fistful of cheddar dropped on the steel around the patty, fried into a lacy skirt that overhangs the bun. The Squeeze Inn's Sacramento signature since 1977.
Runza
A runza is sealed before it is baked: soft yeast dough crimped shut around beef, cabbage and onion while still raw, so the bread cooks closed around a wet load that never leaks.
Roast Pork with Spinach
Roast pork with sautéed spinach and provolone.
Roast Pork with Long Hots
Philadelphia's other sandwich: garlic-roasted pork shaved thin and reheated in its own jus, sharp provolone, and fried long hot peppers whose heat arrives a beat late and builds across the roll.
Roast Pork Italian
Philadelphia's other sandwich: slow-roasted pork shoulder bathed in its own jus, sharp aged provolone, and bitter garlicky broccoli rabe on a long roll. The one locals order over the cheesesteak.
Roast Beef Sandwich
The plain roast beef sandwich: rare beef sliced thin against the grain, on bread, with horseradish. No jus, no soak, no gimmick. The baseline every regional version departs from.
Roast Beef Hero
Cold rare roast beef sliced paper-thin off the deli blade, ribboned into folds on a long seeded New York hero roll with horseradish mayo, lettuce, tomato.
Ripper Hot Dog
A ripper is a New Jersey hot dog fried until its natural casing splits open on purpose, ordered by degree: in-and-outer, ripper, weller, or cremator, from Rutt's Hut in Clifton since 1928.
Riggies Sub
Chicken riggies (spicy chicken with rigatoni) served in a sub roll.
Reuben
Press a spatula down on a Reuben and the sandwich becomes itself: corned beef, Swiss, kraut, and Russian dressing on rye, a loose stack that heat fuses into one thing.
Reindeer Sausage Sandwich
The reindeer dog is an Anchorage street-cart staple: a smoky caribou link cut with pork and beef because reindeer is too lean to bind alone, griddled and laid in a bun with cola-glazed onions.
Red Hot
Rochester's red hot is pork and beef, cured and smoked; its white-hot counterpart is the same trimmings left uncured. The two are sold as a pair, and the cure is the entire difference between them.
Ramp Sandwich
The ramp sandwich is governed by a foraged plant and a six-week window: wild Appalachian leeks cooked soft and sweet, piled on plain bread with a fried egg, eaten while they are out of the ground.
Raising Cane's Chicken Finger Sandwich
Three chicken fingers on buttered Texas toast with Cane's sauce, a one-hand spin-off of the single-item Baton Rouge chicken chain Todd Graves opened in 1996 after his LSU plan failed the class.
Rachel
Sliced turkey (or pastrami) with drained coleslaw, Swiss, and Russian dressing on butter-griddled rye, the slaw and the meat both swapped from the Reuben.
Quiznos Classic Italian
Quiznos built a chain on one machine: the countertop conveyor oven that toasted every sub by default. The Classic Italian, four cured meats and molten mozzarella.