Grinder (New England)

A grinder leaves the counter with a second trip to heat behind it. The cook splits a foot-long crusty roll, lays in sliced steak with onions, or meatballs in red sauce, or sausage with peppers, covers the filling with provolone or mozzarella, and slides the open halves under a broiler or into a pizza oven until the cheese blisters and the cut faces of the crust turn the colour of toast. The tray comes out smelling of scorched cheese, tomato and frying onion, and the paper wrapper clouds with steam the moment it is folded shut. Cold Italian builds of ham, salami and shredded lettuce answer to the same name, so the word covers both temperatures, and a counter in Hartford or New Haven will often ask which one is wanted.

The roll does the structural work. It has to be crusty enough to survive the broiler and the sauce, and the oven pass dries the crumb just far enough that a ladle of meatballs sits in it without turning it to paste. Cheese goes on before the heat so that it melts down into the filling and glues it to the bread; cheese added afterward slides off. A roll toasted too long cuts the roof of the mouth, and one pulled too soon goes soft under the sauce within a few minutes of wrapping. Done right, the first bite crackles, the second stretches a rope of cheese from teeth to wrapper, and the sauce, which runs hotter than anything else on the sandwich, arrives at the back of the tongue a moment after the cheese has cooled enough to eat.

The name has at least three stories and no settled answer. One says it comes from the effort of grinding through a hard-crusted Italian roll; in 1950 a New London newspaper column said the sandwich was sometimes called a jawbreaker, which fits that reading. A second ties it to shipyard workers, with Electric Boat in Groton the usual setting, and readers who write to regional magazines still repeat a family version of that story. A third says an Italian grocer simply gave the sandwich the word. Etymology references date the sandwich sense to 1954 and call its derivation uncertain, which leaves every one of these explanations as local tradition.

Fillings follow the Italian-American counter. Steak and cheese with onions and peppers sits beside meatball, sausage and peppers, chicken or eggplant parmigiana, and a cold Italian with oil and vinegar. A Naugatuck Daily News advertisement of February 1947 for Loretta's Roadside Drive-In pitched a popular grinder sandwich, with meatball-and-peppers and sausage-and-peppers versions among the listed fillings, which suggests the saucy builds were on Connecticut menus within a decade of the word first showing up in print. Pizzerias took the oven side of the trade because the equipment was already there, a deck oven hot enough to reach a split roll in a couple of minutes.

The word follows a map. Speakers say grinder most in Connecticut and Rhode Island, fairly often in Vermont, New Hampshire and western and central Massachusetts, and rarely around Greater Boston and Cape Cod, where sub, hero and hoagie carry more of the vote; the Harvard Dialect Survey of 2003 asked New Englanders and others exactly this question about the long cold-cut sandwich. A New Haven counter takes the word without a second look, and a Boston one may answer with the word sub. The earliest print evidence sits in Connecticut as well.

Origin and history

The earliest printed use located so far is an advertisement in the Hartford Daily Courant of 14 December 1935 for the Elm Tavern at 277 Main Street in Wethersfield, Connecticut, offering "Delicious Grinders and Sandwiches." The venue was a tavern, and so were the next two sightings in the same paper: the Modern Tavern on Main Street in Hartford in April 1937, and the Quaker Tavern on State Street in October 1940, which advertised "Big Italian Grinders."

New London tells a different story from the grocery trade. The Evening Day reported on 10 June 1950 that Benedetto Capalbo, whose surname is also spelled Capaldo, claimed to have first put the sandwich together at his Shaw Street store in 1926, and that account has been retold in the city's papers since. The 1926 date rests on that recollection. Telephone-directory listings from 1946 show grinders on offer in two Connecticut shoreline towns: the Tasty Sandwich Shop in Clinton and Andy's Delicatessen in New London.

The Quaker Tavern advertisement of 1940 is the sharpest piece of dated evidence in the file. It appears five years after the Wethersfield notice, in the same Hartford paper, and it prints the word with no gloss, as a name the reader was already expected to know, with Italian as its only qualifier. By then the sandwich was a Connecticut menu item with its own adjective with the war still five years from its end.