Hero Sandwich

Defonte's opened at 379 Columbia Street in Red Hook in 1922 as a corner store, and by the family's account the longshoremen shaping up on the nearby piers started asking for sandwiches before the shop had a menu. The first, the family says, was ham and cheese with lettuce, tomato and olive oil on a long loaf. A century on, the same counter still sells that build, and a hero there starts the way it does across the city: a loaf nearly as long as a forearm, split end to end, the crust shattering in small flakes onto the white paper as the knife goes through. The crumb underneath is soft enough to take a thumbprint and sturdy enough to hold a pound of meat, which is the whole bargain a hero roll makes with the person carrying it to a loading dock.

A cold Italian hero is assembled for the length of the roll, not the middle of it. Ham, salami and capicola go on in overlapping folds so a bite in the first inch tastes like a bite in the last, with provolone sliced thin against the crust, then shredded lettuce, tomato and onion, and finally oil, a splash of red wine vinegar and dried oregano. Tomato set directly on the crumb wets the bottom of the roll before the bag is folded. A hero left undressed eats dry and tight, the cured meat clinging to itself. Properly dressed, it sits in its paper for twenty minutes and improves: the paper goes translucent at the folds, the oregano and vinegar soak into the bread, and the bite lands cool, with salt from the cured pork, an edge of vinegar and a faint crunch of lettuce.

Ordering is shorthand, and the counter hands fill in the rest. "Everything on it" pulls the full dress, "salt, pepper, oil and vinegar" is a request that runs together as one phrase, and a half is the usual lunch for one person, a whole the usual lunch for two. Defonte's Nicky's Special adds capocollo, salami and fried eggplant to the Red Hook catalog of builds, and every neighborhood deli has its own version of the house combination. The sandwich also scales: in 1955 or 1956, depending on which branch of the family tells it, the Manganaros of Ninth Avenue built a six-foot hero as a publicity stunt, and a family dispute over the name Hero Boy outlived the stunt by decades. Offices still order heroes by the yard and cut them into slices for a Friday meeting.

The hot heroes move the roll from cold-cut vessel to sauce carrier, and they change what the crust is for. Meatballs in red sauce, chicken or veal cutlet parm, sausage and peppers and eggplant parm all go into a loaf that has been split and often run under the broiler first, so the cut faces crisp and resist the sauce for the length of a lunch. Mozzarella melts into strings that stretch from the first bite to the wrapper, the red sauce sheets down the wrist if the roll is rushed, and the steam off the loaf fogs the paper before the sandwich reaches the sidewalk. Fried cutlet heroes hold their crunch for about as long as a subway ride. Eaten at a counter, the cheese is still bubbling at the edges and the bread has a bit of resistance left to it.

The word draws its edges around the metropolitan area. Howard Robboy's regional research lists hero for New York City and Newark, and the counters that sell it span the whole range of the city's food: the bodega griddle where the morning egg-and-cheese gives way to a lunchtime chicken cutlet, the pizzeria that bakes a meatball hero under a blanket of mozzarella, the salumeria that slices prosciutto to order and cuts provolone from the wheel in front of the customer. Each of them hands the sandwich over in paper that is taped at the seam, and each expects it to be eaten within a few hours, while the crust still has a snap and the oil has only just begun to work its way into the crumb

The Word in Print, and a Counter on Ninth Avenue

No record names the person who first called a long sandwich a hero. The loaf-and-cold-cuts sandwich itself came out of Italian-American groceries in New York long before, and the word surfaces in newspapers only in the late 1930s. On 22 June 1939 the word was glossed for New York readers as "the Hero Sandwich (a loaf of Italian bread with ham and Swiss, American or Bel Paese cheese)." That first printed description has no salami, no capicola, no provolone and no oil, which suggests the build was still being worked out while the name was already in circulation.

By 1947 the word had a counter. That year a thousand heros a day were being built for the lunch trade at Manganaro, the grocer at 488 Ninth Avenue. The sandwich was half a French loaf split lengthwise and filled with prosciutto, mozzarella, tuna, sardines or salami, with a double hero priced at seventy cents. The ingredients differ from the modern deli standard, and the roll she names is French rather than Italian, but the format is recognizable: a long loaf, cut open, loaded to order for workers on a lunch hour.

Behind that counter was a grocery that had been selling to the neighborhood since 1893, first as Petrucci's and from 1920 as Manganaro's. The grocery closed in February 2012, after 119 years at 488 Ninth Avenue, and the Hero Boy sandwich shop that grew out of the family business in the 1950s stayed on next door. The 1947 figure of a thousand a day rests on a single newspaper caption, and it is still the best count on record of how many heroes one New York counter sent out in a day from one New York counter, in a shop whose first sign read Petrucci's