Ham and Cheese Hero

Order ham and cheese on a hero at a New York deli counter and the word does most of the work the sandwich cannot. The same ham and provolone answer to different names a short drive away in any direction, and the build barely changes when they do, but inside the five boroughs it is a hero, and that one word pins a build with no named inventor and no origin shop to a specific place and a datable moment in print. The roll is a long split Italian loaf, the ham laid in loose overlapping folds rather than piled into a block, the provolone set against the crust as a mild barrier, and the dress run the length of it: shredded lettuce, tomato, onion, oil, a splash of vinegar, oregano.

That the cheese is provolone and not something softer is the one technical choice this build cannot trade away. Provolone is aged and semi-hard, so it slices clean and holds its shape cold against an oiled load for as long as the sandwich sits in the bag; fresh mozzarella, which a New York counter keeps on hand for its hot baked subs, would slump and weep on a cold one. So the cold hero takes provolone and the hot meatball and parm heroes off the same flat-top take mozzarella, a division of labor between two Italian cheeses that the deli case enforces without anyone naming it. The cheese arrived in the city the same way the format did, Auricchio exporting provolone to Little Italy grocers by the 1880s before American delis started cutting their own milder, softer version off the wheel.

The oil is the other working part, not a garnish. Cured ham brings little fat of its own and the crumb soaks up what there is, so a hero left undressed goes dry the length of the loaf and chews flat; the splash of oil seasons and lubricates from the inside and is what separates a plain ham hero worth eating from one that is merely edible. Tomato kept up on the lettuce rather than laid straight on the crumb keeps the bottom of the roll from going wet before the customer reaches the train. Pressed or griddled on request, the provolone melts into the ham and the crust crisps, and the cold sandwich becomes a hot one without a single component changing, the steam and the toasted crust the only things added.

At the counter it is the default order, named by its parts and shorthand. "Ham and cheese on a hero," the dress assumed unless declined, "lettuce tomato, oil and vinegar" run together as one phrase, "hold the onion" the common subtraction. In a bodega the same sandwich is a fast lunch off the back grill, made to order while a line waits, hot off the flat-top the egg-and-cheese came off that morning. The word travels with the worker and not the recipe: cross into Philadelphia and the identical build is a hoagie, into New England and it is a grinder, and through most of the rest of the country it goes by sub, the one name on the list that belongs to no single city.

Those regional words have their own paper trail, and laid side by side they map one sandwich onto a scatter of local names rather than naming a scatter of distinct sandwiches. Grinder shows up first, in a 1935 Hartford newspaper advertisement for a Connecticut tavern; sub, short for submarine, predates them all in a 1931 Paterson, New Jersey account and was already in print before the Second World War the New London base story usually credits it to. Hoagie reaches the Philadelphia print record in its modern spelling around 1945, wedge a New Rochelle paper as early as 1932. Hero sits among them, the New York reading of the same long dressed roll.

The word that marks the city

The sandwich itself has no origin anecdote, and to trace its history is really to trace the history of its name. The build is the most reduced reading of the Italian-American deli sub that grew up across the urban Northeast as Southern Italian immigrants opened groceries and delicatessens between roughly 1880 and 1920, carrying cured meats, hard cheeses, olive oil, and long bread loaves into the neighborhoods of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and the mill towns along the corridor. By the 1920s the split long loaf layered from the deli case was standard counter fare, and ham and provolone was about as plain as it came.

Hero, the New York word for it, surfaces in print in the mid-1930s, which puts a hard date on the part of this sandwich that can carry one. A Brooklyn Times Union piece in August 1936 describes "a husky man-sized sandwich" and prints a recipe that begins with half a loaf of long bread sliced through the middle; an Albany mention from 1934 may be earlier still, though the sandwich it names is harder to pin to the Italian sub. The name is usually traced to its heroic size, and that reading at least has a contemporary witness: the same 1936 Brooklyn article notes that "it takes a hero to eat one."

The tidier story, that food writer Clementine Paddleford coined hero in the New York Herald Tribune in the 1930s, is repeated everywhere and supported nowhere. No such citation has ever been found in her columns, and her one documented piece on the sandwich runs in 1947, more than a decade after the word was already in the papers, so she was recording a usage rather than minting it. The other common guess, that hero is a worn-down version of the Greek gyro, runs aground on the calendar, since gyros did not enter American usage until the mid-1960s, thirty years after a New York deli was already selling heroes off the case.