Who came up with this jawn?
In Philadelphia and environs, sandwiches have been given an iconic name reserved mostly for metro-area munchers: the hoagie.
Residents of the City of Brotherly Love have coined one of America’s most famed regional cold cut sando synonyms — all apologies to the various homes of the grinder, the hero, the wedge, the torpedo and the sub.
But how on Earth did this one come to be? Sink your teeth into this bit of stuffed submarine roll history.
Reports from The Philadelphia Inquirer date it back to the World War I era and the city’s Hog Island shipyard — now home to Philadelphia International Airport.
The popularity of a succulent, stuffed sandwich for workers on the docks morphed over time to become a “hoggie” and later “hoagie,” according to one account.
In nearby Delaware County, known to locals as Delco, the DiCostanza family of sandwich makers claim that the name entered the lexicon back in the 1920s, when truant kids would order them while playing hooky from school in a similar nonsensical verbiage.
Yet another rumor leaves us marooned back on Hog Island.
This time, the story centers on an Irish immigrant named Hogan was envious of an Italian worker’s scrumptious lunch one day. He paid the paisan for a piece — coining unofficial branding rights for the culinary contraption the next day.
Suddenly, “Hogans” were supposedly in every lunch bag locally.
There could be a much simpler explanation, this one passed down by worker Al DePalma to his daughter Rita Scaltrito.
When DePalma went looking to Hog Island for labor in the 1930s, he witnessed fellows “scarfing down oversize cold cuts sandwiches,” she told the Inky in 1992.
Her father then allegedly scoffed that “those guys look like a bunch of hogs.” DePalma would come to be known as “king of hoagies” — initially selling his “hoggies” to local workers.
Meanwhile, there’s another local sandwich favorite with far less muddled origins.
A few blocks to the north, back in 1930, Pat Oliveri invented the cheesesteak — in an attempt to give cabbies and workers in South Philly a hot, filling lunch option that was quick to make and eat.
Have one. But don’t call it a hoagie.
