Hoagie (Italian Sandwich)

Most of the early twentieth century Italian food in the United States came from the southern Italian immigrants who arrived during the great wave of immigration in the United States from the late 1800's to the early 1900's. Most of these immigrants settled into the large northeast cities of New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Many Italians became fishermen, shoemakers, waiters, fruit and food peddlers, and tradesmen, though most were unskilled laborers working in mines, construction jobs, building roads, and as longshoreman on the waterfront.

The southern Italian immigrants from the Naples, Italy region (Neapolitan) brought with them the Italian sandwich, made with baked crusted bread with pointed ends stuffed with cured meats and cheese. Entrepreneurial immigrants seized on the opportunity to peddle the sandwich to the Italian immigrant workers on the docks at the waterfront, and to the laborers at construction sites.

How the Hoagie Got Its Name

The word hoagie first appears in print in 1945, with alternate spellings like hoogie and hoggie appearing as early as 1941. How it got its name is an often debated topic.

The most commonly touted explanation is that it comes from the name of Hog Island, Philadelphia. In the early part of the twentieth century there was a shipyard on Hog Island (now the site of the Philadelphia airport). During the First World War, Italian-American shipyard workers, or hoggies as they were known, would bring large sandwiches to work with them. The early spelling of hoggie makes this hypothesis attractive, but there is a gap between the shipyard’s years of operation and the earliest attestation of the sandwich name in 1941. The shipyard operated full-bore from 1917–20, after which production rapidly declined before it closed completely in 1925. That leaves only a handful of years for the name to catch on in the city’s consciousness and a gap of some fifteen years before the name is found in print. If the name can be antedated further, the Hog Island hypothesis will seem more likely, but for now this explanation seems doubtful.

The Philadelphia Almanac and Citizen's Manual offers a different explanation, that the sandwich was created by early-twentieth-century street vendors called "hokey-pokey men", who sold antipasto salad, meats, cookies and buns with a cut in it. When Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore opened in Philadelphia in 1879, bakeries produced a long loaf called the pinafore. Entrepreneurial "hokey-pokey men" sliced the loaf in half, stuffed it with antipasto salad, and sold the world's first "hoagie".

A third and more likely explanation is that an enterprising restaurateur coined it. Al De Palma, the self-proclaimed “King of the Hoagies,” claims to have coined hoggie. In 1928, while working as a jazz musician, De Palma saw some fellow musicians eating a submarine. Impressed with the size of the sandwich, De Palma remarked that, “you had to be hog to eat one.” When the Depression hit, De Palma couldn’t find work as a musician and in 1936 opened up a sandwich shop. Recalling the sandwich and his remark from eight years before, he made and sold hoggies in the shop. He was quite successful, eventually opening a chain of hoagie shops and earning himself his sobriquet. De Palma’s claim and story is consistent with the date of the name’s appearance. He opened his sandwich shop in 1936 and the term (hoggie) appears in advertising copy by 1941.