Philadelphia’s Other, Other Sandwich: the Schmitter

I was just reading a listicle of the best sandwiches in Philadelphia. Of the 11 listed, 7 were cheesesteaks, 2 were roast pork sandwiches, 1 was a grinder with brisket, fried egg, horseradish mayo and provolone (sounds pretty good too!) and the remaining sandwich was this, the Schmitter, served at the bar that originated it, McNally’s in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of northwestern Philadelphia.

We like sandwiches with a story here at the Tribunal, and the Schmitter has one. It’s not a riveting story, but it’s a distinct origin for this sandwich. I’ll let Anne McNally, co-proprietor of McNally’s, tell it.

The classic Schmitter as served at McNally’s consists of what they call “roast beef” that looks a lot like raw lean steak going onto the grill, grilled onions, cotto salami, thick slices of tomato, melted white American cheese, a “Schmitter sauce” similar to a Thousand Island dressing, all piled together in a Kaiser roll. For a while it was served at Citizen’s Bank Park during Phillies games, and it’s available at Lincoln Financial Field for Eagles home games as well. Now, in the offseason, McNally’s is the only place you can get one.

Though that may appear to make the Schmitter a one-off sandwich, served by a single place, according to my source in Philadelphia that’s not entirely the case. My old podcasting buddy and real life brother-from-another-mother Aaron lives in the Philadelphia area these days and his local tavern, Greeks in Narberth, PA, serves a sandwich called “The Narb” that is surprisingly similar:

Aaron tried both the Narb and the Schmitter, and had this to say about the latter:

It was not my cup of tea but it is a substantial sandwich. For me, and I assume you will disagree with me, their salami is a little too peppery and the special sauce is a little too sweet

I had so many plans for this sandwich. I anticipated eating the sandwich while watching the Bears knock the Eagles out of the playoffs. Sadly, that one went the other way. I contemplated panning the sandwich the following weekend, in retaliation for having no Bears game to watch. Then the Eagles flamed out, and I felt bad.

Furthermore, I had hoped to find some Schmidt’s beer to drink with the sandwich, for verisimilitude if nothing else. That took me down a rabbit hole–historically, there have been 2 different breweries by that name, Jacob Schmidt Brewing in Minneapolis and Christian Schmidt Brewing in Philadelphia. Jacob Schmidt brewed Schmidt beer, popular in the upper Midwest, until 1954, after which the brand changed hands a number of times before being bought by G. Heileman Brewing Company in 1972. Christian Schmidt brewed Schmidt’s beer, a local Philadelphia favorite, until 1987, when according to Wikipedia the brand was also bought by G. Heileman Brewing Company.

Sadly, or not, G. Heileman Brewing Company was acquired in a shady deal with junk bonds in the late 1980s, a deal which fell through and led to their eventual filing for bankruptcy. In 1996, all their brands became part of the Pabst Brewing Company, who still brews many of the products. Pabst’s Portfolio page lists a Schmidt’s beer as one of their current products, but most of the Pabst brand history seems to reference only Jacob Schmidt. Meanwhile, the website Schmidt’s of Philly sells memorabilia of the Christian Schmidt brewed beer. The site’s History page appears to have been cribbed from a document written circa 1960, save the last paragraph which describes William Pflaumer, who bought the brewery in the 1970s, as having “crashed Schmidt’s into ground in spectacular fashion by the mid 80s.”

There’s still Schmidt’s beer being made somewhere–in California I believe–but I have no idea what relation it has to the beer that inspired this sandwich. It’s probably not worth finding. It’s also probably not worth dedicating several paragraphs of this post to it. C’est la vie!

The Schmitter

For the sandwich itself, I’ll have to make my own–I’d love to visit my buddy Aaron in Philly, hang out at McNally’s and/or the Greeks, drink something a bit more potent than a mild American-style adjunct lager, and have a grand time, but by the time this is published, we in the Midwest will be living in a nightmarish winter hellscape where our breath will freeze and suffocate us upon taking two steps outside our houses. So this sandwich will need to provide enough calories for us to hibernate away the next few days. (That should not be a problem)

I’m using the recipe from Saveur, if anybody feels like playing along at home. This recipe again calls for roast beef, as do some others I’ve seen. Still others mention very thin-sliced steak. I’m in the mood for ribeye. The best place to get a consistently thin-sliced ribeye, in my experience, is a Korean market, where they sell many different cuts of meat sliced to an unvarying thickness of 3/16″ or so for use in Bulgogi, Galbi, and other forms of Korean Barbecue.

Cotto Salami is “cooked” salami, and it’s something like a summer sausage, and something like a coarser denser bologna. The recommended brand for a Schmitter is Hatfield’s, which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen. While my Cotto Salami may not have that last name, it does have a first name.

I also picked up a package of bakery Kaiser rolls and some Land-o-Lakes white American cheese at our local, along with a big yellow onion that I sliced thinly and a couple of decent tomatoes (for January) that I sliced thickly.

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The Saveur prep starts with buttering the griddle and cooking a handful of onions on the left side, with the beef on the right. Beef this thin cooks fairly swiftly, so it’s important to have everything on hand and ready to go, and the broiler in the oven should be on and warmed up. After the beef has cooked on both sides, the onions get flipped and the beef laid on top. At that point, two slices of Cotto Salami, a slice of cheese, and two tomato slices are stacked on the other side of the griddle.

Piling the cheese and tomatoes on the salami is a smart move–without it, the salami will bubble upwards (unless you cut slits in it to prevent that). However, the cheese and tomato is sufficient to weigh down the salami and keep it in contact with the griddle–it should get nice and brown. Anne McNally says you should even burn it a little.

Once the salami is on the griddle, the Kaiser roll gets sliced in half and put under the broiler with a slice of cheese on each half. Once that salami’s nice and brown and all the cheese is nice and melty, then it’s time. The salami/cheese/tomato stack gets inverted on top of the steak, and we’re ready to go.

We start with the bottom half of that Kaiser roll. Then we take that big pile of onions, beef, tomatoes, cheese, and salami and stack it right on top.

I didn’t mention the sauce yet, did I? The sauce is a combination of mayonnaise, ketchup, sweet pickle relish, and a little Worcestershire sauce. Aaron is right that the combination of the sugary ketchup and the sweet pickle relish tilts this sauce a bit too far into sweet territory. Maybe if it were chili sauce instead of ketchup, or if you added a bit of horseradish–but that’s not what we’re doing. Here is a good portion of faithfully recreated Schmitter sauce–one to two ounces, according to Anne McNally–glopped right on top of that meatstack.

Now we put the top bun, also toasted and covered with melted cheese, on top to finish.

So that doesn’t look like a whole lot of sauce. Watch what happens when I cut it in half for the cross-section though.

I kid, but this really isn’t a bad sandwich. It’s not a revelation by any means–there’s nothing magical or greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts you’re going to get from this particular combination of meats, sauce, and melty cheese that you couldn’t get from many other meats, sauces, and melty cheeses–but it’s good, and it’s satisfying, and if I were in Philly I’d try the real deal.

I mean, I’d try a cheesesteak first, obviously. You can’t go to Philly without having one of those. And I’d probably need to get one of those roast pork sandwiches as well, because they look even better than the cheesesteaks do in my opinion. But after those, I’d definitely try a Schmitter. And whatever beer they were serving with it.