[Sca-cooks] Dinner Tonight

[Terry Decker]

Here's what the The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
Third Edition, has to say on the subject under submarine.

Bear

Regional Note: The long sandwich featuring layers of meat and cheese on a
crusty Italian roll goes by a variety of names. Submarine, sub, and hero are
widespread terms, not assignable to any particular region. Most of the
localized terms are clustered in the northeast United States, where the
greatest numbers of Italian Americans live. Jane Stern, having studied the
great variety of American names for this sandwich, finds that upstate New
Yorkers call it a bomber, while speakers downstate refer to a wedge. In the
Delaware Valley, including Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, the
sandwich is called a hoagie. In Italian restaurants in New England the menu
is likely to include a grinder. Speakers in Miami use the name Cuban
sandwich and in Maine, Italian sandwich, but in the southern Midwest,
according to Stern, the name Italian is common, with both Italian and
Italian sandwich recapturing the authentic nationality of the sandwich. In
New Orleans the same sandwich is called a poor boy and is likely to be
offered in a most un-Italian version featuring fried oysters.

>Disputation of above notwithstanding, my point was just that the
>quoted passage (doubtless written as part of a commercial, and not
>educational, endeavor) suggested that "grinders" originated among
>Italian immigrants on the Eastern seaboard. My own experience
>suggests that this is not true of the area around the Brooklyn Navy
>Yard, one of the most active shipyards on the Eastern Seaboard, and
>probably in the history of the US, and where such sandwiches have
>always been known, AFAIK, as "heroes".
>
>Adamantius (noting that, I believe, a spiedie sandwich is also a
>sandwich, and not a sub)