St. Louis-Style Pizza Sandwich

At Ruma's Deli in St. Louis, a length of Italian bread is split and laid open, spread with garlic butter, covered in sliced ham, capped with Provel, dusted with paprika, and slid under a broiler until the cheese blisters at the edges. That is the Gerber, the sandwich that carries St. Louis pizza onto bread. The city's pizza is thin-crust, cut in squares, and topped with the same Provel, a processed blend of cheddar, Swiss, and provolone that melts at a low temperature into a glossy sheet. No St. Louis menu on record uses the phrase "pizza sandwich"; kitchens put the pizza's cheese and garlic butter on a loaf and call it a Gerber.

Split and laid cut-side up, the bread works as a base, and the garlic butter soaks into the cut face and fries the crumb as it toasts. By the time the Provel melts, the edges of the bread have gone brittle and the center is greasy and soft. Under the broiler the cheese holds together where an aged cheddar would weep oil, clinging to the ham in one continuous blanket that can be lifted whole. A Gerber out of the broiler is too hot to bite for about a minute, garlic fumes rising off the butter while the Provel still shines and slides. Wait too long and the cheese seizes into a rubbery skin that peels away from the ham in one piece.

Provel tastes mild and faintly smoky-sweet, buttery, with almost no sharpness, and stretched it slumps more than it pulls. Visitors from places where pizza means mozzarella often find it strange, while St. Louisans tend to hear that strangeness as home, and the argument runs on in both directions every time an out-of-towner orders a slice. On an open sandwich the cheese coats the whole surface in an even cap, so each bite of ham, butter, and bread arrives under the same mellow layer, with a little rust-colored paprika on top and the garlic coming through from underneath.

The pizza connection runs through the Hill, the neighborhood where much of St. Louis's Italian-American cooking took root, and through the delis and pizzerias across the city that keep Provel by the case. A kitchen that already stocks the cheese for its pizzas and keeps garlic butter on hand can make a Gerber from a loaf of bread and a few slices of ham in under ten minutes. That convenience is probably part of why an open-faced sandwich with such an unusual cheese became a fixture of neighborhood delis, and why hot ham-and-Provel sandwiches in the same shape turn up on menus all over the metro area.

Ordered at lunch, it often comes with a side of toasted ravioli, the city's breaded and fried pasta pockets, served with marinara for dipping, and a square of gooey butter cake for afterward, flat and sticky under its powdered sugar. Every item on that tray comes out of St. Louis kitchens, and the ravioli runs on the same Italian-American pantry as the Gerber. The sandwich is eaten in pieces, the Provel cap pulling a little as each piece comes away and setting firmer by the minute, so the last bites taste more of toasted garlic bread than of cheese.

Origin and history

Provel was on St. Louis pizza a generation before the Gerber. A trademark for it dates to 1947, and accounts split the credit between Costa Grocery, working with a Wisconsin dairy, and J.S. Hoffman Company of Chicago, with John Sigillito of International Foods credited with spreading it. Imo's Pizza, founded in 1964, says it bought Costa Grocery for its Provel distribution rights.

The sandwich's date is firmer. Dick Gerber owned a tire shop next door to Ruma's Deli, and Dee and Tom Ruma let him build his own sandwich in their kitchen. They liked the result enough to add it to the menu in 1973 under his name. The early version reportedly used provolone, with Provel becoming the standard later. Whether Ruma's invented the ham, cheese, and garlic-bread combination is disputed; the name and the first menu listing both trace to the deli.

The name later turned into a fight. In 2003 the Riverfront Times gave its "Best Use of the Worst Cheese" award to DB's Sports Bar for its Gerber, and after the paper gave the same honor to Ruma's in 2008, the Ruma's owner accused DB's and other restaurants of trademark infringement. Kitchens around town changed their menus, and most of the city's open-faced ham-and-Provel sandwiches now sell under other names, renamed in the dispute St. Louis nicknamed Gerbergate.