Italian Sub

This is the recipe for an authentic, Boston-area Italian sub. Obviously, there are as many variations as there are sandwich shops, and I like it with a couple tweaks, which I’ll detail below. But in my experience with the most hard-core sub makers and eaters, who have been doing it one way for generations, this is how it should go down.

You want to make sure to use soft enough bread, which is a major reason that versions of this fail. If you’re fighting to bite through the bread, the cheese/meat conglomerate will squeeze out the sides. You want the bread to be able to hold up to all that it contains, but not create any sort of impediment to eating it. You also don’t want to slice all the way through, so you’ll need bread that’s soft enough to slice open, then unfold (like butterflying the sub roll, essentially) without ripping the uncut side.

Other things that make this fail (in my opinion): mozzarella cheese (totally the wrong consistency: if it’s good, it contains so much water as to make the thing a soggy, drippy mess, and if it’s not good it doesn’t contain very much water and why are we still even talking about it?; roasted red peppers (there is nothing on any sandwich I hate more. I also fail to see the Italian connection.); prosciutto (the way it is streaked with fat is not conducive to the sandwich structure and it is often too stringy to be eaten effectively with this other stuff. Plus, good prosciutto is too good to become merely a building block of something else like this – the idea is that these meats and cheese together create something insanely porky and multi-faceted; I’m not saying never to eat prosciutto with bread, but it’s delicate enough that it generally should be enjoyed on its own, not on a sandwich or pizza or whatnot. Bottom line – if prosciutto is paired with something, that pairing should be intelligent and intentional and should elevate the prosciutto, not bury it in the mix.)

Finally – I don’t know how to tell you want quantities to use, since that will really depend on the size of your bread. I’m going to assume you have a ¼ or ½ pound of everything, so enough to snack on and make your sandwiches and maybe put some back in the fridge. The more important thing, I think, is the ratio: I’m going to guesstimate that it should be 40% genoa salami and 30% of the other two. Each meat and the cheese should be sliced at the exact same thickness – that’s important.

So here’s what an Italian Sub with Everything should look like:

• 1 sub roll
• 2-3 slices mortadella (with or without pistachios, according to taste)
• 6-8 slices genoa salami
• 4-6 slices capicola (hot or sweet, according to taste)
• 3-4 slices provolone
• Sliced red onion, cut into quarters
• Sliced tomatoes, cut into quarters
• Pickles, cubed
• Banana peppers/pepperoncino/hots (to taste)
• Italian seasoning (usually a mix of basil, oregano, and thyme, sometimes with rosemary or sage added)
• Olive oil
• Red wine vinegar

You should be aware that the vinegar, more than other condiments, will sog up bread to the point of oblivion, so you’ve got to ensure that this sandwich will be eaten very quickly after the vinegar is introduced.

There are two notable ingredients missing from the “everything” – mayo and lettuce. I don’t know why these are missing, but it’s kind of like creating one of those “anti-pasto salads” that you see for sale in Italian-American delis, which contain cubes of salamis and sharp cheese and are marinated in oil and vinegar, but are not bound with something so crass as mayonnaise, between two pieces of bread. As for lettuce – well, you can imagine tomato and onion swimming around in that same salad, if not pickles, but not wilted, stringy, tired lettuce leaves. So in that way, omitting these two things sort of makes sense. This is how it was done at Bob’s Fine Foods, in Medford MA, an imported foods deli and prepared foods, fresh pasta maker and sandwich shop where three generations of Bobs (and lots of brothers and uncles not named Bob) roamed the floor greeting the same old ladies they’d been greeting since before the war, as well as all of their many generations of offspring, and where I worked for about six transitional and instructional months of my life. Half the guys working there had records and all of them wore running pants. I quickly conformed to the latter, although somehow have avoided the former. The way that that place slung steak and cheeses, Italian subs, chicken and eggplant parms at lunch time was something to behold. As far as sliced meats, pastas, and sandwiches, I don’t think there are too many places in my book which did it better. The irony and the beauty of it is that I’m sure there are dozens of places that do it just as well, and that’s only within, say, a 30 mile radius. When I later worked at Urban Gourmet, which was a different place with different kinds of ambitions, we also made sandwiches, but they often bucked peoples’ expectations since they weren’t the same kind of star in that place – for instance, the steak sandwich was an actual grilled steak, sliced up and placed on a sub roll with something like caramelized onions and other shit. When customers complained almost on the daily that it wasn’t what they expected, I heard the owner more than once tell them, I’m not serving that horsemeat shit in here, and stuck to his belief that he was right in a world that constantly told him he was wrong.

In any case, at one point early on after joining up as the sandwich and salad guy, coming straight from Bob’s Fine Foods, I made an Italian Sub with Everything for someone that did not include lettuce. The owner, who was working the roast and grill station (this was only weeks before he turned all stations over to me and headed home to watch the entire restaurant from the comfort of his living room on his cc tvs that he was proud of recently wiring up) and must have seen it, because he came over and asked where the lettuce was. I told him I thought this was an Italian Everything. He said, I don’t know, my everything is everything. The mise en place for sandwiches included lettuce of course, just as it had at Bob’s, but this guy’s everything meant everything. I don’t remember ever finding out what what the customer thought of that, but he got an Italian with mayo, mustard, and lettuce, in addition to the oil and vinegar and all the other crap (probably sprouts or avocado) that we had. In his own way, he was right – everything means everything, and if you don’t want everything, tell me exactly what you do want and I’ll put it on – but at the time, and still to a certain degree, I feel like he was violating an unspoken standard that had been hewn over time by local consensus. When I’m ordering sandwiches or burgers or tacos to this day, I don’t think it’s an unreasonable question to ask “what’s everything?” before ordering it – from one place to the next that can easily mean avocados or mushrooms as easily as roasted red peppers, which would be a crying ass shame.

In any case, that’s why I feel like it’s important to submit to this collection what I think of as the Platonic Ideal of an Italian Sub rather than just my own personal version – but when I’m making it (or ordering it) for myself, I dispense with the oil and vinegar and Italian seasoning, and I do add mayo and lettuce. I’ll usually lose the onions too, if you must know. And I always serve and enjoy immediately.