Fridays in Lent: the Pepper and Egg Sandwich

Not every sandwich shop in Chicago makes a pepper and egg sandwich. Those that make them don’t necessarily have them all year. During the part of the year they do serve them, they don’t necessarily serve them every day. The pepper and egg sandwich tends to be very specifically seasonal and cultural, an Italian American workaround for Fridays in Lent.

The practices of fasting and abstinence in the Catholic Church vary from place to place, but generally speaking, Catholics in the US abstain from eating meat on Fridays during Lent. For Italian-American sandwich shops in the business of slinging sopping-wet Italian beef sandwiches, whose traditional customer base eschews beef on certain days during certain parts of the year (though there are other cheats such as gravy bread), this represents a) a loss of sales, or b) an opportunity to serve their customers in a new way, depending on how you look at it.

When I posted earlier in the month that we would be covering the pepper & egg sandwich this month, I almost immediately heard from my old friend Michael, a lifetime fan of the pepper and egg sandwich, who tweeted offering to meet me for one at Fast Track, a classic hot dog and beef joint on the near West side.

We each ordered a pepper and egg sandwich, his with giardiniera, mine without (yes, I know, I’m always pounding the giardiniera drum here but I wanted to try the thing in its pristine condition first) and waited for our orders to be ready. They took a few minutes, after which we sat at a table and he consented to let me photograph his sandwich before digging in.

“As a Jewish man growing up in Chicago, it seems to me that the pepper and egg sandwich may be the best thing Catholicism has given us,” he started. As a lapsed Catholic myself, the conversational paths leading on from that statement were limited, so after a half-hearted Spanish Inquisition joke from me, he continued to tell me more of his thoughts about this particular favorite sandwich of his.

There are two basic types of pepper and egg sandwiches, he told me. There’s the standard scrambled eggs style sandwich, which from my subsequent studies appears to be the more common kind, especially in the types of places that normally serve a lot of Italian beef sandwiches. However, he’d brought me to Fast Track to try the other kind, where the eggs are cooked fresh into a type of bell pepper omelet, which is then stuffed into a bread roll.

This was a very good sandwich, much different than the sparse examples of pepper and egg sandwiches I’d experienced previously. The eggs could have been seasoned a bit better, and I probably should have tried it with giardiniera (the bottle of hot sauce on the table helped on both counts), but the bread was crisp-crusted with a light crumb and the eggs were hot and fluffy. I go back and forth on the flavor of cooked green peppers but they worked for me here.

I had not ordered fries, and the sandwich hadn’t quite filled me up, and there are only so many Fridays in Lent, so I stopped on the way back to my office to try another pepper and egg sandwich, this time from usual suspect Luke’s Italian Beef, right near my office.

I was immediately struck by several contrasts. The Luke’s sandwich came out almost immediately, suggesting that the eggs were precooked and scooped out of a heated bin. They were scrambled, well seasoned, tasty, and not too dry, but the texture and temperature was markedly different. Also, the Luke’s sandwich was huge, as their Italian beefs are. If I’d eaten this one first, I wouldn’t have stopped for a second sandwich afterward.

One of the places I visited previously for a pepper and egg sandwich, and one that shows up on a lot of “Best pepper and egg sandwich in Chicago” lists, is Fiore’s Delicatessen in Ukrainian Village. I visited again this month and found a similar sandwich to Luke’s: a soft chewy roll with scrambled eggs and peppers that I watched them scoop out of a microwave-safe bowl. This particular sandwich was quite oily due to my requested addition of giardiniera. I’m not sure why the Fiore pepper and egg is so highly thought of, other than perhaps longevity or the fact that it’s one of the few places where you can get them year round, any day of the week.

But the more I thought about it, the more Mike’s comments about the two kinds of pepper and egg sandwiches made sense to me, and it made sense that a place like Luke’s would go for the scrambled egg variety. The thing about an Italian beef sandwich is, despite the fact that there is a lot of thought and effort that goes into prep for it–the rub for the beef roast, actually roasting the beef, collecting and supplementing the juices to make the gravy, using the right type of bread rolls, even going so far as matching your giardiniera to your beef and gravy recipes–the actual assembly of the sandwich is very fast. They dip a fork into the gravy and scoop out some beef, stuffing it into the open roll in their other hand and repeating as necessary for the correct amount of beef. Then they dip either end of the sandwich into the gravy, wrap it up and hand it to you. It takes a lot of work to get to that point, but actually making the sandwich is quick and easy.

When it comes to the pepper and egg sandwich, many Italian beef joints treat them as a similar assembly line item, and as a mere supplement to their main offering. They have a large pan full of scrambled eggs and cooked peppers; they scoop the peppers and eggs into the same dense chewy bread that they use for an Italian beef sandwich, wrap the sandwich and hand it to you. The sandwich isn’t really a thing unto itself, but simply a way for them to accommodate certain observant customers during days of abstention.

And that’s great, and thoughtful, and I’m certain it’s appreciated by the more traditional Catholics among the city’s Italian American population. On the other hand, if you’ve ever seen a short order cook in a diner make an omelet on a flat top grill, it’s a different process from scrambling a bunch of eggs or even making an omelet at home. The cook pours out the beaten egg into a roughly rectangular shape on the grill, covers it with the omelet fillings and lets it cook, eventually using a long flat spatula to fold the omelet over on itself 2 or 3 times. Any place with that type of grill, a place like Fast Track, has an advantage when making this sandwich in that they’re set up for that style of cooking and there’s an expectation of a bit of a wait when getting your sandwich.

I had a near-miss experience ordering a pepper and egg at Frangella’s in Palos Park, where there was a short wait while they prepared a very good omelet-style filling for their pepper and egg sandwich. The only way in which this sandwich fell short, for me, was in the bread they used, the same soft chewy bread they use for their subs. I wanted something crisper and lighter. Otherwise, this was a perfect example of the kind of pepper and egg sandwich I like.

Ultimately, if you’re going to be as picky as I’ve been about a sandwich, your best bet may be to make it yourself. For me, I’d choose a diner-style pepper omelet served in a piece of good baguette like Damato’s. Frangella just happens to carry Damato’s, so I picked up an extra long while I was there. Unfortunately, I don’t have a flat top grill to cook that perfect rectangular omelet. However, when I was searching for omelet pans on Amazon, I noticed that Japanese omelet pans are rectangular. Meet the most-used pan in my kitchen for the past week or so.

With a single egg and a splash of milk, this pan turns out a perfect rectangular omelet which can be folded over twice, but is perhaps too thin for this purpose. However, with 2 eggs and about half of a sliced pepper that’s been sauteed in olive oil with a little garlic and onion, the omelet is a bit tougher to fold over twice, but is just the right size for my purposes.

That perfect crust of the Damato’s baguette, the perfectly hot and fluffy eggs, the light garlic and onion flavor infused into the peppers, and just enough salt to bring those flavors out. I may never need to buy another pepper and egg sandwich again.

I did just hear about another promising short order place serving them downtown though. And there are a couple more Fridays in Lent.