The St. Paul Sandwich of St. Louis

In 2002, PBS aired a documentary by Rick Sebak of WQED in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, called Sandwiches You Will Like. This may not mark the absolute beginning of what would become the Sandwich Tribunal–it would be a few years yet before I met the friends who inspired me to start this website–but watching this documentary (available in full on Youtube currently) certainly nudged Mindy and I along the road to some sandwich-related adventures.

Within a year or two we tried our first Hot Brown together at the Brown Hotel in Louisville Kentucky, while there to attend a friend’s wedding; we cured and smoked our first pastrami in the backyard of the home we owned together at that time in Quincy, IL, and made some tasty (but not quite as tender as I’d have liked) sandwiches from it; and we went on our first entirely-sandwich-related road trip together, to St. Louis, to the same Kim Van restaurant they’d visited in the documentary, to try the St. Paul sandwich.

I remember not liking it very much at the time, sadly. I think the fault was more with me than with the restaurant, but let’s be honest, the St. Paul sandwich itself is a bit of a Frankensteinian experiment to begin with. Chinese-American egg foo yung served on squishy white bread with mayonnaise, pickles, tomatoes, and lettuce? How did such a thing come to be? Why is it considered native to St. Louis, yet named after another city hundreds of miles north?

The History of the St. Paul Sandwich

There are competing theories about that. One is that the sandwich was invented by the proprietor of Park Chop Suey in St. Louis, and named after his hometown. The other, more interesting theory posits that there was another type of St. Paul sandwich, lost to living memory, that was eventually adapted by Chinese restaurant owners in St. Louis to use their own ingredients and techniques in an effort to try to serve their customers’ needs.

St. Louis blues historian Kevin Belford found some evidence to support the latter theory while researching his (out of print, and dear on the second-hand market) book Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-war Blues Music of Saint Louis Missouri, and wrote about it on his blog of the same name, concluding

…the history of the St. Paul sandwich has been an established St. Louis restaurant item now for at least one hundred years. It seems very likely that the various Asian, African and European immigrants in the densely populated city was the unique combination of factors that contributed to the creation of the Americanized Egg Foo Yung sandwich with the Catholic name – the Saint Louis Saint Paul.

Kevin Belford, Devil at the Confluence, 2011

I’m with Kevin to an extent–I believe the St. Paul sandwich as it now exists to have been invented in St. Louis. I believe also that it hung on to popularity in St. Louis far longer than elsewhere, to have been reborn as this Chinese-American specialty. The original St. Paul sandwich may have been popular over much of the midwest. A search of the Library of Congress website Chronicling America shows ads in the African-American weekly newspaper The Appeal, from St. Paul, Minnesota, as early as 1903, advertising the St. Paul sandwich available at Mills’ Sandwich Room in St. Paul.

And again, a more elaborate ad appeared in multiple issues throughout 1905.

However, what was this St. Paul sandwich? Was it “composed principally of ham and eggs” as the St. Louis version was, according to Kevin Belford’s research? I found one description of a sandwich called “St. Paul” in a 1943 issue of the linguistics journal American Speech, in an article describing the lingo of diners and tea rooms.

Of course, not only was this journal published in Alabama, far from St. Louis or St. Paul, the sandwich description doesn’t make much sense as is. Four pieces of bread, with chicken between slices 1 and 2, and egg between slices 3 and 4? Unless there’s something else holding slices 2 and 3 together, that’s just an egg sandwich sitting on top of a chicken sandwich as far as I can tell. My continued search brought to light a description from the early 60s, of the sandwich as served at a cafeteria in downtown St. Louis.

“The filling combines chopped ham, eggs, and chopped green pepper.” That certainly hews closer to the original St. Paul as described by Kevin Belford. I’m not certain that before the 1960s an African-American would have been able to enjoy a sandwich at Miss Hullings’ lunch counter though. Unfortunately, many downtown restaurants refused to serve African-Americans until 1961, when the Public Accommodations law was passed making it illegal to refuse to serve customers based on race in St. Louis.

So perhaps the Chinese restaurateurs of St. Louis adapted these recipes to cater to their otherwise underserved clientele? A blogger on Medium.com notes that there is a deep connection between the African-American community in St. Louis and the storefront Chinese restaurants that serve those neighborhoods, though there is also much distrust, in part a lingering legacy of the city’s segregationist past.

A Trip to St. Louis

Mindy and I recently had occasion to revisit the St. Paul sandwich as served by Kim Van restaurant in St. Louis. The restaurant hasn’t changed much in the 16 or so years since we were last there. The signs outside are less obviously hand-painted, but the interior still contains the same green and white painted walls, and the same posters from the Sandwiches You Will Like documentary that were there back in 2003.

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Thinking of the Medium piece and its description of the unique style of fried rice served in St. Louis Chinese restaurants, we ordered a plate of fried rice. As described, the rice was a dark brown in color, as opposed to the yellowish fried rice I’ve usually seen elsewhere. It was good, but not life-changing.

We also ordered an item I have not seen on other Chinese restaurant menus outside of St. Louis–“Hot Braised” chicken. The Hot Braised chicken comes in either boneless or with-bone varieties. I assume the boneless would be served somewhat like General Tso’s chicken, but we ordered it bone-in.

These were fat, meaty chicken wings, fried hard, glazed in a gooey sauce that is somewhat like a General Tso’s, but less sweet, quite savory, spicy, and with a heavy hit of garlic. They were outstanding and I’d drive to St. Louis right now to eat them again if I could.

The star of the show came wrapped in wax paper, on a plate, along with the plastic knife I’d requested so I could cut it in half. (People get weird if I bring one of my big sharp kitchen knives along with me to a restaurant)

Inside, the sandwich was as previously described. Squishy white bread, with mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, and pickles, and of course the thick egg foo yung patty in the middle.

I had been ordering egg foo yung from our local Chinese restaurant for the past month or two, to get reacquainted with the dish and to develop a taste for it in preparation for this sandwich. This egg foo yung patty was different though. Our local’s patty is onion-heavy but not highly seasoned. This one was largely made up of bean sprouts, glued together with egg, and was somehow more savory as well, possibly due to the addition of MSG. The sandwich was… good? It was.

After an afternoon of browsing independent bookstores and attending a somewhat outrageous performance at a local art foundation, we decided to visit “ground zero” for the Chinese-American St. Paul, where it is said to have originated, Park Chop Suey.

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Here we also ordered fried rice, as good as or better than that at Kim Van. We also ordered more of the hot braised chicken, which despite being not quite as good as Kim Van’s, I was unable to successfully photograph before eating the entire box. Our goal though was again the St. Paul sandwich, ordered with duck meat this time, which was unavailable at our previous stop.

This time we asked the guys behind the counter to cut the sandwich in half for us, and I think the clean cut here demonstrates the prevalence of bean sprouts typical to our experience of the egg foo yung served in St. Paul sandwiches in St. Louis. By way of contrast, here is a version of the St. Paul sandwich that I made from egg foo yung ordered from our go-to local Chinese-American spot, En Lai in Midlothian, IL.

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There are some sprouts in there, I’m sure, but diced onions play a much larger part in the makeup of this egg foo yung. En Lai does a great job with many Chinese-American standards, and I’ve enjoyed the egg foo yung I’ve bought there, but it’s best served with their gravy rather than on a sandwich.

An Historical Reenactment

I still really wanted to get a feel for what the original St. Paul sandwich was like, and kept searching indexes of old cookbooks from the first half of the 20th century for recipes. I found a likely source in Emory Hawcock’s 1928 cookbook, Salads and Sandwiches and Specialty Dishes for Restaurants and Tea Rooms. Hawcock was the Chef-Steward of Hawcock’s Cafe, a tea room in Monmouth, a town of around 9,000 in Western Illinois, near Galesburg and the Quad Cities.

I could not locate an online copy of Hawcock’s Salads and Sandwiches, so I paid probably a little bit too much for a copy on eBay. Hawcock’s recipes are sparsely sketched-in–as he puts it in the book’s preface:

If some of them seem a trifle brief, it is because I expect those who read this book to be at least partially experienced in the art of cooking for and serving the public. To them too much detail would be unnecessary and boresome.

Emory Hawcock, Salads and Sandwiches, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1928, p. xiii

And here is Mr. Hawcock’s take on the St. Paul sandwich:

“Chop fine a slice of ham, a slice of onion, a slice of green pepper and a small sweet pickle, stir into a beaten egg and fry brown on both sides. Serve on toast with lettuce and olives.”

So I scrambled up an egg, mixed in a slice of onion, a slice of green pepper, and a slice of ham, all diced finely. I don’t generally care much for sweet pickles and don’t have them on hand, but I did have some sweet pickle relish so I used some of that, and I seasoned the egg mixture with salt and black pepper. I fried it all up in a square sandwich-sized egg mold I just got for this purpose long enough to set its shape and brown the egg, then removed the mold and flipped it.

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Hawcock specified for it to be served on toast. I extrapolated that the toast should be buttered. I added lettuce, per spec, a top slice of buttered toasted bread, then cut the sandwich in wedges, garnished it with olives, and served it with chips.

It doesn’t look like much. But I’ll be damned if this wasn’t a tasty sandwich, the kind we look for here at the Tribunal, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I think that touch of sweetness from the pickles is what puts it over the top. You can see why people liked it so much a hundred years ago. I’m not quite sure why it died out the way it did. But you can see that it is a clear precursor to the St. Paul sandwich as served in St. Louis today.

An interesting thing about Emory Hawcock–his only other published work was another cookbook, called Practical and Profitable Chinese Recipes. In fact, there are several pages worth of Chinese recipes in the back of Salads and Sandwiches, including a recipe for egg foo yung. Does this make him some kind of missing link? No, I don’t think so. I think that the innovation that made this sandwich a St. Louis classic belongs to the Asian-American restaurateurs working in the African-American communities of St. Louis, as we earlier surmised.

It’s a fascinating history though, behind an unusual but relatively benign sandwich. Fascinating to me, anyway–thank you if you’re still reading. I feel like I could spend another week or two studying the St. Paul, digging into old food industry journals, learning more about the way a clash of cultures brought it into being. But June is coming to an end, and soon we will have three more sandwiches to research. But if anybody out there has any interesting historical insight into this St. Louis specialty, please reach out and let us know!