What other thing is as reliably cheerful as a sandwich that’s practically the size of an automobile?
It’s not the end of the world to have to skip a birthday. But if yours happened to land in the early spring, quarantine requirements and hard-to-schedule vaccination appointments might have meant missing out two years in a row. Last year, my best friend, Heidi, celebrated her 55th birthday by standing on her building’s front stoop for a cold, windy hour while a couple of friends rode up on bicycles and said hello from a safe distance. This year, she smartly delayed her birthday by a couple of weeks and was able to spend it with a few healthy, vaccinated friends during a sunny weekend on Fire Island. I said I’d bring the birthday lunch. Given the terrible associations we’ve all just had with the measurement of six feet, I wanted to somehow “reclaim” the language and take the gloom out of it, so of course a six-foot hero came to mind. What other thing is as reliably cheerful as a sandwich the size of an automobile?
My go-to spot for such a colossus would have been Manganaro’s Hero Boy on Ninth Avenue, which claimed to be the originators of the six-foot sandwich it had peddled since the 1950s. What a store that was. You could smell the funk of aged provolone and the must of prosciutto from the sidewalk. It was thrilling to see those sandwiches being trucked out the front door by two aproned deli guys — one in front and one in back, like pallbearers, with the long white cardboard box on their shoulders — and sliding it into the back of the delivery van. But the shop closed down this year, and so I decided to make my own.
My first experiences with a large-format sandwich were meatless and only two feet long but nonetheless delivered whopping delight, and I still think of them as an ideal prototype. They were my French mother’s clever, frugal way of feeding her five children while on vacation one summer in Corsica. After she woke us early and drill-marched us up mountain trails or down cliff sides on narrow, uneven goat paths to sandless beaches, she finally let us sit down and rewarded us with lunch. We each got a torpedo of fresh baguette filled with ripe tomatoes, mayonnaise, onions and salt and pepper that had perfectly marinated in her bag during the morning’s hike.
But as I got a little older, growing up outside Philadelphia, it was all about the Italian hoagie. Valparaiso’s Deli was just a quick ride away on my three-speed Schwinn up the hill from our house. Their hoagies were classic; whole loaves of seeded semolina bread stuffed with sweet capicola, soppressata and deli ham, and crammed with the best part — the condiments and toppings. They used jarred red peppers, shredded iceberg lettuce, oil and vinegar, dried oregano and, importantly, provolone cheese. Provolone has that tangy, salty-sour note that makes an Italian hoagie not just some other meat-filled sandwich.
I am sure everybody knows how to build a sandwich, and I won’t be prescriptive here. The simple perfection of the vegetarian version my mom made has never left me, so I wrote this recipe without meat but designed it to taste like the Italian subs of my adolescence. Obviously you can fill them as you like, but I have some advice that you may find useful: Build first, season last. Hinge the bread like a book that lies open on its spine, rather than cutting all the way through. Have your ingredients ready, and put your condiments — mayo, oil and vinegar — into squeeze bottles as they do at delis. That way, you don’t smear and upset the beautiful work you’ve just done neatly shingling out your fillings. Wear latex gloves, which help with grip.
All large-format meals generate a certain kind of excitement — a huge outdoor paella over a wood fire has an impressive gravitas, and a whole spit-roasted hog signals community bond. But I can’t think of anything else that sets off so much giggling glee as a six-foot hero placed on the table, pinned shut with frilly picks. Is it all in the reveal? The timing? Or is it simply the comedy of somebody who digs around in a rucksack, metaphorically speaking, and pulls out a sandwich as big as an Ohio-class submarine?
Heidi’s small gathering was my first return to “normal” socializing, and a part of me was bracing for a long weekend of people compulsively swapping their quarantine stories, for which I feared I didn’t have the capacity. I needn’t have worried: A six-foot hero, it turns out, is a bull’s-eye pre-emptive strike, instantly distracting and ongoingly spirit-lifting. Stepping off the arriving ferry with my long loaf wrapped in brown paper and strapped with packing tape to a plank of plywood had strangers all around me smiling. And the lucky friends who got to eat it were still chuckling about it when we hugged goodbye.
Recipe: Six-Foot Meatless Italian Hero
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