The story of the sandwich is well known, dating back to 1762 in England to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich.
Montagu demanded meat between bread, creating an unstoppable trend. Most sources point to a gambling habit that requires a quick and easy meal. But like many people today, he may have been looking for a quick and easy meal.
The revolution that Montague started spread throughout the world. The sandwich was adopted, refined, and became especially popular in hotbeds of Italian immigration. There, to this day, deli meats and cheeses roll off the slicer into long roll sandwiches with interesting regional names. They are Sparky, Wedge, and Po’boy. They’re hoagies, grinders, and especially on Super Bowl weekend, 6-foot subwoofers.
The combination of long roll sandwich and submarine was perhaps inevitable given their matching silhouettes. No wonder, then, that the origins of their marriages are often connected to shipyards.
In New London, Connecticut, there is a story about an Italian shopkeeper named Benedetto Capaldo.
Capaldo’s long roll sandwich became so popular among workers at the nearby U.S. Navy submarine base during World War II that the name “submarine sandwich” is said to have stuck. There is a similar story of a wartime shipyard in Boston, where sandwiches were called “subs” locally.
But in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware, print ads for submarine sandwich shops appeared more than a year before World War II began in Europe. Early advertising for Delaware Sub Shop dates back to his late 1936. Still, the first mention of the Submarine sandwich in the archives kept by Newspapers.com was five years earlier, in the summer of 1931, when it appeared on the page of Patterson’s Evening News. .
Although the origin of the term “submarine sandwich” remains debatable, the story based on the submarine Patterson begins with Dominic Conti.
A turn-of-the-century immigrant from Montella, Italy, Conti owned and operated the self-proclaimed Patterson Grocery Store, first at 49 Grand Street and then at 92 Mill Street, in the early to mid-1900s. said grandson Dominic Conti of Paramus. There, Conti, born around 1875 as Domenico His Conte, sold sandwiches on long, tough Italian he rolls.
The recipe was simple: sliced deli meat, lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, and onions were sandwiched between layers of cheese to keep the bread from becoming soggy from oil or vinegar splashes. However, the sandwich wasn’t originally called a sub.
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As an oft-quoted family legend goes, Conti came up with the name the first time he laid eyes on one of John P. Holland’s submarines. Holland, an Irish-born teacher at St. John’s Catholic School in Paterson, launched the first large submarine in the Passaic River above Great Falls in 1878, the year Conti was born. The one-person submarine dived to a depth of 12 feet and remained submerged for an hour. Partly built in Patterson, it was narrow, like a herring, and had slab-sided sides. It was the next Dutch model that clearly caught Conti’s attention.
The so-called “Fenian Rum” was bulbous, airship-like, and powered by a Patterson internal combustion engine, and was financed and eventually stolen by Irish nationalists. The Fenians intended to use this submarine to destroy the British fleet, but abandoned it because they did not know how to use it.
After being recovered, the submarine was used as an exhibit for several years before being sold for scrap. In the summer of 1927, she was salvaged from a scrapyard on 79th Street in New York City by Irish-American activist Harry Cunningham. Cunningham sold it to Paterson car dealer Edward Brown, who donated it to the city for public viewing in December of that year.
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Conti’s grandson said he was probably in his early 50s when he first saw the Fenian ram parked in Paterson’s Westside Park. The resemblance to his trademark cold cut sandwich was apparently enough to make history. Another grandson, Samuel Conti of Frenchtown, said Mr. Conti took advantage of the similarities and soon began selling “submarine sandwiches” in his own grocery store.
Based on modern tastes, it’s no surprise that their grandfather’s trademark sandwich remains. Around 1930, popular sandwiches included deviled cheese and ham. A blend of mashed baked beans, chopped pickles, stuffed Spanish olives, and mayonnaise (known as the Boston Bean Sandwich). A blend of peanut butter, sandwich relish, salad cream and pickle relish.
The name resonated beyond the submarine’s construction.
According to Edwin Eames and Howard Roboboy’s 1967 book The Submarine Sandwich: Vocabulary Variation in Cultural Context, today, as in the 1960s, “submarine” or “submarine” is the most common sandwich style. It’s definitely a common name. ” Since then, the name has become even more ubiquitous thanks to the Connecticut-born Subway brand and the Manasquan-based Jersey Mike’s Subs brand.
There are still many competitors. In some states, more than a dozen names exist for roughly the same style of sandwich.
Northeastern New England has “grinders.” New York created a “hero.” And Philadelphia created the “hoagie.” The third has become the norm in South Jersey and continues to spread through Wawa’s growth.
According to one of several origin theories, “hoagie” was coined in the mid-1930s by Philadelphia’s “King of Hoagies,” Al de Palma.
Mr. De Palma’s claim, captured in Mr. Eames and Mr. Roboboy’s own words, was that in 1928, when they saw someone eating what was then called a “submarine sandwich,” they thought, “Hoggy.” ”, which Mr. de Palma used when he opened the store. 1936.
“I told my brother, who was with me at the time, that you would have to turn into a pig to eat this,” De Palma said.
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Around the world, in Perth, Australia, there is a ‘contirole’, strangely enough. Short for continental roll, the name comes from ingredients sourced from mainland Europe rather than the British Isles, ABC Australia reports. The sandwich’s origins are debated, but it was invented in the 1950s by Antonio Di Chiera, an Italian immigrant and former owner of a Perth deli, and has no connection to Patterson’s Conti.
According to local records, Conti died in April 1954. His previous store was vacant, fell into disrepair, and was demolished in the 1960s. According to newspaper reports, the Mill Street property was slated to become a used car parking lot until the New Jersey Department of Transportation purchased it in 1991 to help rebuild Oliver Street. The project necessitated the relocation of the Dublin Spring Memorial, which was erected in 1931 in front of Conti’s Grocery Store.
For more than 20 years, Conti had been designated the monument’s official custodian by the city’s fire and police commissions. According to a report in the Paterson Morning Call in November 1931, he was asked to honor the statues sculpted by famous Italian artist Gaetano Federici, whose works are scattered throughout Paterson. , the police were given special privileges.