Po' Boy (Shrimp)

At Domilise's on Annunciation Street the fry cook drops a basket of shrimp the second the order is called, because the sandwich is timed backward from the bread. A length of New Orleans French loaf is split, swiped with mayonnaise, laid with shredded lettuce, tomato, and pickle rounds, and then the shrimp lift out of the fryer and go straight on, still loud. The whole assembly takes about as long as the shrimp take to cook, and it has to, because every second the fried coat waits is a second it spends softening against the dressing.

The shrimp can come from the Gulf or a freezer. The cornmeal dredge is the same one a hundred kitchens use. The lettuce and tomato are whatever the produce truck brought. What a visitor cannot pack home is the loaf. New Orleans French bread is built with more water and less flour than a baguette, baked to a crust that breaks into flakes and a crumb so light it goes nearly to air, and it crushes flat under the hand in a way a denser roll never will. That collapse is the point: the bread folds around the filling instead of fighting it.

Every part fails in its own direction. Fry the shrimp a shade too long and they tighten to erasers inside the crust; pull them early and the coat stays pale and slick instead of crisp. Dress the loaf too wet and the bottom goes to paste before it reaches the table, the exact sog the thin crust has no defense against; dress it too dry and the thing is just fried shrimp and stale bread. Build it more than a few minutes ahead and the steam off the hot shrimp does the harm from the inside, undoing the crisp the fry just set.

A finished one comes wrapped in butcher paper that goes translucent at the seam. Bite in and the crust gives way in a dry crackle, then the coat snaps, then the shrimp underneath are still hot enough to steam when you pull the halves apart. Cool lettuce and tomato land a beat behind that heat, mayonnaise binding the whole thing slick, a bright burst of pickle near the end. Flakes of crust drop the length of the bite. It is loud food, and the noise is half the pleasure.

Ordering is a single word at the counter. "Dressed" means lettuce, tomato, pickle, and mayonnaise; "undressed" means none of it, the shrimp and bread alone. Nobody pauses over the choice and nobody explains it, because in New Orleans the vocabulary is assumed. The shrimp po'boy shares the case with the oyster, the catfish, the soft-shell crab, and the hot roast beef whose gravy soaks the bread on purpose, and a regular at Domilise's or Parkway Bakery names the filling, the dressing, and a size in one breath and moves down the line.

The variants run by filling. The oyster po'boy swaps in fried oysters and trades brine for sweetness; the catfish version trades crunch for flake; the hot roast beef po'boy abandons the fry entirely for shredded beef and gravy and is messier than any of them. The half-and-half, beef on one end and shrimp on the other, is its own order. Split bread top and bottom around a filling makes the fried-shrimp po'boy a sandwich outright, and the only argument it starts is over which corner shop fries the shrimp right.

Price tracks the shrimp, not the bread. A shrimp po'boy costs a few dollars more than a roast-beef one because Gulf shrimp move with the season and the catch, and a shop that fries to order has to buy fresh enough to fry. The good ones run the fryer hard through lunch and let the line back up rather than hold cooked shrimp under a heat lamp, since held shrimp are soft shrimp, and soft shrimp on this bread are the whole sandwich gone wrong.

Done right it eats messy and stays crisp from heel to tip, the crust shedding flakes, the shrimp hot and the dressing cold in the same bite. Done wrong it is sodden at the bottom, or the shrimp went to rubber, or the dressing was too timid to matter. The margin between the two is roughly ninety seconds at the fryer and the nerve to dress it last.

The Strike and the Loaf

The most-told story puts the sandwich at a shop run by Benjamin and Clovis Martin, two former streetcar conductors from Raceland who opened near the French Market in 1921. When New Orleans streetcar motormen and conductors walked off the job on July 1, 1929, the Martins fed their striking former colleagues for free, and by the telling greeted each man at the door as "another poor boy." The name fastened to the long, cheap, filling sandwich, and "poor boy" began turning up in print and on menus through the early 1930s.

The story should be told with its caveat. At least one New Orleans historian has noted that the strike account was not described in the local press until roughly forty years after the fact, and the Martins' own 1929 letter pledging to feed strikers named no sandwich at all. Firmer is the bread: the baker John Gendusa is credited with making the first loaf cut for the sandwich in 1929, a long roll with squared ends so the filling reached corner to corner, and the Leidenheimer Baking Company and Alois J. Binder still supply the shatter-crust French bread a real one depends on.

So the loaf carries a steadier date than the legend. The fried-shrimp version arrived as the form spread across the fryers of the city, where Gulf shrimp were cheap and the oil was already hot, and shops like Domilise's, opened in 1924, and Parkway Bakery and Tavern, opened in 1911, built their names on whose shrimp came out of the basket crispest. The strike that gave the sandwich its name began on July 1, 1929, and the squared loaf John Gendusa baked for it that same year is the part a kitchen can still hold in its hands.