Not Quite a Silk Purse? Pig Ear Sandwiches

July, 2020. It’s a few months into lockdown, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, and my friend Mike Mayer reaches out to me on Facebook. “Has Sandwich Tribunal ever done the venerable pig ear sandwich?” he asked. “I’ve been told it’s a Quincy delicacy.”

Now, I get people asking me about weird random sandwiches all the time, given the whole “Internationally Recognized Sandwich Expert” title I’ve given myself. I don’t pretend to be all-knowing when it comes to sandwiches, and when someone hits me with a stumper I’m usually more than happy to learn about a new item to add to our List. This guy is hitting me on my home turf though. I grew up in Quincy, Illinois, a river town of about 40,000 people that’s about as far west as you can get and still be in Illinois, and I feel sheepish to admit that I have never heard of a pig ear sandwich being served there. But I cave and ask Mike for more details anyway. Sadly, he has none. “Any sources I may have are about 40 years out of date, but my mom swears it was a thing back in the day.”

When I dig into it later though, I find one tiny little peripheral mention in an article archived on the local newspaper’s website memorializing Robert Mau, owner and editor of a weekly farm newspaper in Kankakee County, Illinois. The article describes his frequent visits to Quincy and his love for Zim’s Tavern, a small but busy bar and grill at the corner of 12th and Ohio. The offerings at Zim’s, according to this article, had included “such delicacies as pig-ear sandwiches, brain sandwiches and other savory dishes for the discerning palate.”

Zim’s is more familiar territory for me, as it would be to many people who lived in Quincy during the 1980s. Having moved there late in 1981, 11 years old and in 6th grade, I myself did not frequent the taverns in those days. However my mother and then-stepfather raved about the fried chicken at Zim’s and on rare treasured occasions would bring something home from there for us–cheeseballs were my favorite, an objectively terrible but fiendishly addictive treat I’ve mentioned a time or two on this site. Sometimes they’d bring us burgers or a ponyshoe or even some of the treasured fried chicken itself. We did not delve deeply into the menu–I do not recall pig ears being discussed and I would not have been likely to try them at the time–but everything we had was great. A deep and abiding love for cheap street food served at bars and taverns was born in me then that abides today.

It wasn’t until years later though that I was both old enough and had lost enough of the food fussiness of my youth to seek out the deep cuts on my local taverns’ menus. Unfortunately, by that time Zim’s was only a memory. Sometime in the early 1990s it had been sold, or the building and equipment had anyway, to become Mr. Bill’s, which serves burgers, horseshoes, and cheeseballs to this very day. Mr. Bill’s does not, however, offer a pig ear sandwich.

Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi

The catalyst that had started this conversation about pig ear sandwiches was a BBC Travel article that Mike shared with me, about a little dive in Jackson, MS that was known for its pig ear sandwiches. In the article, the author quotes a fellow customer explaining what is so special about the Big Apple Inn and its food, and the quote is I think a great encapsulation of soul food in general.

Well, you know something? All the unwanted bits of the pig – the feet, the tail, the chitterlings (intestines) and the ears – back in the day, it was what the slave owners used to give to the enslaved for their weekly rations. It’s a wonderful thing that what was once about struggle and survival has been turned over time into a thing of comfort. Soul food. It’s simple, but it’s delicious.

There’s a phrase that is used in many cultures to describe this nose-to-tail usage of an animal–and specifically a pig–by taking the less-wanted parts, the organs, the feet, the tails and brains and ears, and making use of every bit of it to feed one’s family, one’s community. This phrase has served as the title of many a book and scholarly articles and has been claimed by various cultures throughout the world. Perhaps no people has lived it more thoroughly though than the enslaved blacks of the south who, with ingenuity and persistence, created such a rich and storied cuisine from the rationed discards of the white Southern Aristocracy. The phrase is, “everything but the squeal.”

There are other places in the South (though L&G Grocery appears to have changed its menu since that video), and even as far north as St. Louis (though on two separate occasions now I’ve asked for them at C&K Barbecue and been told they were out), that serve pig ear sandwiches. There are places all over the US, yes even up here in the North, where you can get various kinds of soul food. However on the strength of that article, that quote alone I knew I had to experience this Big Apple Inn for myself. Cue the Sandwich Tribunal Road Trip Montage:

Jackson is only about a ten-and-a-half hour drive south from here, but various factors had combined to make me the only driver on this trip and, a few days before leaving, I rearranged our itinerary, trimming a few stops and thereby shortening each day’s drive. So it was that we ended up our first night in Memphis, Tennessee, within a stone’s throw of Graceland, and in awe at the inexplicable Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. Jackson, in our revised itinerary, would be only a day trip, 3 hours there and another 3 back, with limited time for exploring. The stay in Memphis, however did provide me my first opportunity to eat Bojangles, which was fine. (I liked the country ham biscuit better than the chicken biscuit, but I am a sucker for country ham) (The biscuits are pretty darn good though)

The next day we made a beeline to Jackson, where a constant stream of cars were stopping along the stretch of northbound one-way Farish Street that Big Apple Inn shares with a church, a funeral home, and an alternating collection of well-kept lawns and boarded-up storefronts. The drivers would pull over, run in, make an order, wait the few minutes it takes to prepare their sandwiches, and then drive off–there was no dine-in happening at the time of our visit, a rainy January day nearly 2 years into a global pandemic.

An ordering window runs along the first eight or ten feet inside the door at Big Apple Inn. Behind it stands a griddle, bain maries full of hot sauce and pig ears and hot dogs and fried bologna simmering atop it, a pile of minced red smoked sausage being intermittently shifted around to keep it from browning too hard on one side, a foil-wrapped exhaust hood looming above. To the rear, tables and chairs sit, unused. All around, brown wood paneling and the browning memorabilia of a long-standing local business–newspaper articles, old business certificates, decorative amusements of years gone by. It’s a dive, and as someone who generally likes dives, I have to clarify that this is an extremely divey dive, and if dine-in were available I’m not sure I’d take the option–some of the paint on the ceiling fixtures looks ready to fall at any moment.

We ordered pig ear sandwiches, smoked sausage sandwiches or “smokes,” a few bologna sandwiches, and some of the “TALMALES” mentioned on their menu board, the Delta-style hot tamale that inspired the kind-of insipid machine-made industrial tamales available at just about any hot dog shop in Chicago. As we exited, the sky opened up and we were soaked in the few seconds it took us to run across the street to the car, where, shivering, I struggled to get a decent photo of any of these treats other than the tamales.

The tamales were great–the lineage between these and the Chicago version is easy to see, but where ours are thick dry cylinders lacking flavor or any distinction besides color between the outer cornmeal layer and the inner “meat” core, these were wet, greasy, thin, a tiny swipe of intense, salty spicy ground beef swaddled in a slightly thicker layer of moist cornmeal. These tamales were thin, so thin they lacked the structural rigidity to be eaten out of hand and were served with a plastic spoon. I went back later to order a dozen more but they’d sold out for the day.

Later, warmed up in our hotel room, I took my time getting some better shots of the sandwiches.

Each sandwich is made in exactly the same way: a small slider bun / dinner roll is pulled from a bag and split in half. The primary ingredient–whether fried bologna, pig ear, hot dog, smoked sausage, or even a hamburger (an option listed on the menu which we did not explore)–is placed on the bottom bun, covered with a spoon of coleslaw which is then tamped down with the practiced motion of a gloved thumb, splashed with a spoonful of mustard and then hot sauce in turn, and then covered with the top bun. The sandwich is then placed on the griddle while the rest of the sandwiches for the order are assembled. Each sandwich is then wrapped in wax paper, the remaining sandwiches still on the griddle occasionally shifted around or flipped if they’ve been sitting too long. They are then slid into a small brown paper sack large enough to hold perhaps 4 of these slider-sized sandwiches–larger orders group the smaller paper sacks into a plastic grocery bag–and handed to the customer.

“Everything” means coleslaw, mustard, hot sauce. I don’t recall seeing any other condiments available. There are some bags of chips clipped to a display on the wall but I never saw anyone getting one. There are 5 type of sandwich, and tamales. That’s it.

The pig ear is great, to be honest. Pig ears are made of skin, cartilage, and a little bit of fat, none of which makes for great eating without being properly handled. These ears have been pressure-cooked in a seasoned stock long enough to just about fully gelatinize the cartilage, making this mostly a meat jello sandwich, mildly salty, with a bit of crunch from the slaw and some kick from the hot sauce and mustard. It’s a brilliant combination, to be honest, a simple combination where each ingredient brings something out from the others. It’s probably not for everyone–if you have textural issues you may not care for it. I’m a fan, though.

Possibly slightly edging the pig ear out as my favorite sandwich from Big Apple Inn though was the smoked sausage. These sandwiches are made with “Red Rose Imitation Smoked Sausage”–I think this means that the smoked flavor is “imitation” rather than the sausage but I’m not entirely sure. This is the pile of beet-red minced sausage that is sitting in a corner of the griddle, constantly browning, awaiting the next order. According to the ingredients list, the casing is dyed with FD&C Red #3 but I’m not sure where the rest of the meat gets that color. In any case, it is way better than it has any right to be, and again is well-complemented by the simple and immutable combination of condiments offered by Big Apple Inn.

The bologna sandwich features a thick slice of cheap bologna, fried until well-browned at the edges, and the same combination of coleslaw, mustard, and hot sauce as the other sandwiches. The bologna’s ends are curled up the way bologna is wont to do when fried, and the ingredient-to-condiment ratio seems skewed in favor of the condiments in this sandwich, but even it was a better fried bologna sandwich than I’ve had in a while.

The hot dog sandwich, which I did not photograph, was a butterflied half of a cheap hot dog dressed the same way and served on the same bread. We did not order the hamburger at all but given the simple nature of the menu at Big Apple Inn, I’d venture a guess that this holds true for it as well. And I’m not sure I’d change that. I like these sandwiches, and I even like the place, despite thinking that a few pieces of it could stand some sandblasting.

I’ll go back some day soon, I have no doubt. We only gave ourselves one short afternoon in Jackson this time around, and it deserves a deeper exploration. We picked, at random, one soul food restaurant to stop in and order some oxtails and collard greens. That restaurant was a little roadside shack, not much of an online presence, paper menu taped down to the order counter kind of a place. It was called Bully’s.

They were letting people dine in at the small collection of tables in the room adjacent to the front counter but we simply ordered our oxtails and greens and took them out to the car to eat. No photos, as this was not intended to be something we reported on the website. Then we went back in and ordered several more things and devoured them without photographs simply because the food was too delicious and we were too impatient to get it in our bellies. I don’t know if this place is exceptionally good or if the soul food of the south can’t truly be replicated up here–I think many would say the latter but I suspect it is the former. In any case, Bully’s has absolutely ruined me for any other collards, and I will return to Jackson if for no other reason than to eat there again.

Phantom Zim Syndrome

The southern-style pig ear sandwich served by the Big Apple Inn did not seem likely to bear much resemblance to those that were once served at Zim’s Tavern in Quincy, though. Quincy was settled largely by German immigrants–the Zim in Zim’s Tavern is short for Zimmerman, and Zim’s itself stood on the eastern edge of a historically German neighborhood in Quincy now called the South Side German Historic District but traditionally known as Calftown. In other words, it was a German bar in a German neighborhood in a German city. German cuisine is not the same as soul food, though they do have some commonalities–gelatin-rich meat dishes, greens flavored with smoked meats, a focus on comfort foods. I would not expect to see a German sandwich dressed with coleslaw and hot sauce though.

Quincy is not exactly a small town–it was once the second largest city in Illinois and often referred to as “Little Chicago,” though these days it does not crack the top 10–but its relative isolation (it’s the biggest town in a 100-mile radius and not really on the way from anywhere to anywhere, just sticking out all awkward like a boil on Illinois’ bottom) give it kind of a small town feel. What I mean to say is, if there’s a well-loved local restaurant that closes and you want to track down one of their recipes, odds are you know someone who can get it for you.

That was certainly the case here–one of Mindy’s oldest friends is Stephanie, daughter and granddaughter of the people who had run Zim’s Tavern, and Mindy put me in touch with her on Facebook Messenger.

Hi Stephanie! Thanks for chatting! I wanted to ask about an item that was apparently on the Zim’s Tavern menu, a pig ear sandwich?

My grandmother used to make both pig ears and pig brain sandwiches

Do you remember anything about how they were prepared or served or anything? Or maybe have her recipes? I don’t suppose they’re still on the menu at Mr. Bill’s

I doubt they would still make pig brain sandwiches–I believe they quit making them once pigs were killed with a bolt to the head as opposed to how they used to do it. And besides, I don’t believe my dad sold any of the recipes.

I’ve made a fried pig brain sandwich before. It was not my favorite

I could ask my dad if he is willing to share how they did the pig ears … but no guarantees! None of those “delicacies” were part of my general food groups lol

Well I’m interested in learning about it if I can! A friend told me that pig ear sandwiches were once popular in Quincy and the only thing I could find online was a Herald Whig article that mentioned they were once served at Zim’s. I was also reading about them as a Mississippi soul food staple, and I know pig ear and pig “snoot” sandwiches are a thing in St. Louis bbq restaurants

From my dad:

I put some water in a pressure cooker pot. I used a pressure cooker at the medium weight for 30 to 45 minutes, jiggling, at least 1 onion, salt and pepper

If you need more clarification I can ask lol… Also from my dad:

We also refrigerated the ears in the juice and it will jell when it’s cooled. Not to worry, the jell is used to reheat the ears

With regard to brain sandwiches. I am not sure what all they mixed in with it… I think egg, salt, pepper… then they coated it like a tenderloin and fried it (I think)

Thanks! So they’d prepare the ears ahead of time and reheat them to order? Do you know how the recipe ended up in your family? Sorry to hit you with so many questions it’s just got me curious

All good questions! I will ask my dad… I am guessing my grandmother made them first (ears) but I could be wrong. They ate, what I considered, a lot of disgusting depression era foods.

Interesting read, that article about pig ears being a food from the south… so my dads answer involves that as well…

Germans have been eating them before the south. It is said that the only thing that isn’t eaten in a hog is the squeal. That being said pigtails, pig ears, headcheese, brains sandwiches–all these are from the motherland. Pig ears are basically skin, gristle, a little bit of meat and some fat.

And yes the nose and the tongue all went into the head cheese or spud. Intestines were used to pack sausage in. The stomach was used to make a delicacy with a meal cooked inside the sows belly. Expensive eating. The feet were pickled and were delicious along with the tail.

… and he added that my mother would never eat one (I agree with this sentiment )

How were they served, in a hamburger bun? what else went in the sandwich?

Horseradish and some put mustard on them. Served them on bread.

Thus concludes my dads commentary on pigs

Your dad is right, pigs are delicious! Thank you very much for putting up with my questions, and thank your dad too! I’m inspired to try and make pig ear sandwiches, but I don’t think Mindy wants to try them either

So according to Stephanie’s dad, Germans eat “everything but the squeal” as well. Let’s see how his recipe for pig ears turns out!

This is a colander containing about 8 freshly washed pig ears. The ears have been sitting in my freezer since my last trip to a butcher shop, awaiting this opportunity

There’s not much to them, as Stephanie’s dad pointed out–cartilage, skin, some fat and maybe a little piece of meat hanging off where they were detached. I’ll be pressure-cooking them in a few liters of water with two unpeeled halved onions, some freshly cracked black pepper, and a little salt.

Stephanie’s dad was also not kidding about the highly gelatinous stock this would produce. After 1 hour in the pressure cooker and chilling overnight, the stock could be completely inverted without even rippling its surface.

The German-style pig ear sandwich is served on regular bread according to Stephanie’s dad. The pig ears are shaped differently than the slices of multigrain I’m using here though, wider and triangular.

I found that if I cut the pig ear in half though, into two roughly equal right triangles, those could be rearranged with a little bit of overlap into a rectangle about the same size as the bread.

I went a little heavy on the mustard and horseradish but voila! The Zim’s Tavern pig ear sandwich, recreated.

This pig ear hasn’t been cooked to quite the gelatinous homogeneity of the Big Apple Inn pig ear, which spends longer in the pressure cooker–it still has some snappy texture to the middle layer of cartilage. I could have been more aggressive about seasoning the cooking stock as well–the aroma is there but a little more salt would help the pork flavor come out more. Still, it’s not a bad sandwich at all, with some seriously sinus-clearing bites from the horseradish. Some butter, slowly melting into the bread from the residual heat of the pig ear would be a good addition. I wouldn’t want to put it on a regular squishy white bread but this multigrain, a whole wheat or something heartier, like a rye, would be a good option.

But now that I had some pig ears cooked, I might as well take a crack at the Big Apple Inn style sandwich as well. The dinner roll-sized slider buns they use are much smaller than a slice of bread, but the sandwiches pictured above appeared to have 3 layers of pig ear, and cutting an ear into 3 pieces gave me two pieces just about the right size for the bread and one weirdo triangle that I stuck on top there anyway.

It was clearly not as stable a construction as they were dishing out at Big Apple Inn, though. I tamped down my coleslaw, which was wetter than theirs, immediately expressing a thin stream of dressing down the side of the sandwich. Wiping that away the best I could, I continued with a squirt of mustard and a few dashes of my homemade hot sauce.

It was good but… not the same. And I suppose that’s OK. Pig ears are a hard sell, and I’m not sure how someone would go about getting this sandwich to take off in the North.

And if I have to drive back to Jackson, Mississippi to get another one, so be it. I’ll make sure to get some more oxtails and collards from Bully’s while I’m there.