sandwiches shouldn't be a dare - Blaugust the Fifth

07 Aug, 2025

Italian beef sandwiches are bad sandwiches.

Tradition as Machinery

Let me be fair before the mobs arrive with wet napkins and soggy pride.
The history of the Italian beef is—like many origin myths—genuinely noble. A tale of immigrants in Chicago, slicing meat with the fervor of survival, selling to fellow workers on the street, and eventually braving the American dream by opening storefronts.

That part? Beautiful. Honest. The kind of grit that makes the stars on Chicago’s flag mean something.

But somewhere along the way, the myth calcified. A cultural tradition became a culinary dare.

Rituals of the Soggy and Damned

Italian beef is everything but a good sandwich.

Here’s my beef¹:
A sandwich should not have the structural integrity of a fever dream. And yet here we are—handing over money in exchange for self-inflicted squelch. The giardiniera sweats like it’s seen things. The bread collapses like a worker under too many double shifts. And if you try to eat it by hand, like C’thulhu intended, you’re going to end up wearing more beef than you swallow.

What once was an emblem of working-class ingenuity has been twisted into a ritual of wet-fisted consumption. You kneel at the altar of au jus, praying your shirt survives the ordeal. A perversion of the sandwich’s divine grace: ease and elegance.

Capitalism in Cross-Section

Italian beef isn’t food anymore. It’s performance.
It’s what happens when you commodify resilience, then resell it to the next generation as nostalgia with mustard on the side.

Here’s how the nightmare unfolds:
Cook the meat until tender. Let it cool—not for taste, not for tradition—but to allow thinner slicing. Why? To stretch it. To sell more. To mask absence with ritual.

Thinness masquerades as flavor. The dip becomes necessity. You rehydrate what you’ve leeched out. Moisture as marketing. You have created for yourself this culinary limbo—dry ash made edible only through broth. The meat is but a memory, the bread is penance, the experience a palaver between what could have been great and the Lore² we construct.

You aren’t eating lunch. You’re participating in a system that devours its own origins and calls it authenticity.

Soup is Not a Sandwich

If I wanted soup, I’d order soup.
But I came for a sandwich—and I left with a Faustian bargain wrapped in butcher paper.

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Footnotes

#blaugust #favorite #food #screed