Steamed Hoagies of Eastern Tennessee

In January of 2021, I read an article about sandwiches on a website called The Bitter Southerner that instantly became my favorite piece of food writing. I have yet to read one better, and it is certainly miles above anything I have written or could ever aspire to. There’s a good chance that if you and I speak regularly, I have raved about this article to you and demanded you read it at some point. For those whom I have not harassed about it already, here is the link: THEY LIKE THAT SOFT BREAD

For those who prefer to get all their sandwich knowledge direct from this ever-flowing tap right here: I appreciate you. But you’re missing out. The Bitter Southerner piece by Chelsey Mae Johnson combines personal reminiscence of a childhood in South Knoxville with an investigation into the origins of eastern Tennessee’s steamed hoagies, portraits of some of the characters still slinging them, a discussion of the technology behind that regional delicacy and how it came to be applied to such an unlikely target as a sub sandwich. It earns every one of its 7,000 words and the photos are beautiful as well. And of course, ever since I read it I’ve wanted to travel to Knoxville and see the places she talked about, eat the sandwiches.

This month, I did, or tried to. And in some ways, I missed the mark. It was a good weekend regardless.

Mindy and I left the Chicago area after work on a Thursday, driving down to the vicinity of Louisville, Kentucky before stopping for the night. The next day, we drove on to Knoxville, and past it, all the way to the Smoky Mountains range of the Appalachians that separates Tennessee from North Carolina. The drive had been a bit too long for us to wait until we reached Knoxville to eat, so we stopped for lunch along the way and then hiked off some of those calories to get a look at Grotto Falls just southeast of Gatlinburg.

Eastern Tennessee is stunning, at least once you get past the 30 miles of Wisconsin Dells style tourist traps lining the roads to Gatlinburg, the entrance to Smoky Mountain National Park, and of course nearby Pigeon Forge, home of Dolly Parton’s theme park Dollywood. The lush greenery looms right against the edges of narrow, shoulderless roads that wind haphazardly around nature’s obstacles–a hill, a stream, a preternaturally stubborn bit of forest–as opposed to the rigid grids to which I’m accustomed, coming from the flatlands of Illinois. Every trip requires a drive, but every drive becomes an adventure. Even the invasive kudzu has a kind of beauty, rendering trees into Halloween ghosts, whole sections of forests into rooms full of unused furniture draped with leafy green dust covers.

After our hike–which took longer than we anticipated, partly due to the moderate difficulty of the hike but mostly due to us being older than we like to admit–we drove back into Gatlinburg, where we thought we’d try the first steamed hoagie of our trip. Unfortunately Parton’s Deli, source of many of the Bitter Southerner article’s better photos and anecdotes, was already closed for the day.

Sometimes a business’s hours will change, but I think that was not the case here–this plan fell afoul of my generally chaotic method (anti-method?) of trip planning and an extended hike. We shrugged, drove back to Knoxville, and stopped by a few other delis near our hotel that I had identified as potential candidates for steamed hoagies–all were either no longer in business, closed, or simply did not serve the sandwich. We drove downtown to Knoxville’s Market Square, a lively open-air pedestrian mall full of rooftop bars and hip restaurants. It was also full of Knoxville 20- and 30-somethings having nights out; tiaraed bachelorettes and their retinues; students returning to University of Tennessee on move-in weekend, along with their parents and friends. We went from doorman to hostess for a bit looking for a spot to sit down and take in some nourishment but there were no available spots to be found.

Eventually it started raining and we gave up on Market Square, drove back toward our hotel, and stopped in at nearby Abridged Beer Company just before their kitchen closed. There we enjoyed a very nice burger and fried green BLT, some excellent buffalo wings, and a puzzling but tasty beer menu.

The next morning, rather than go straight to a deli–9am is too early for them to serve a hoagie, surely?–we enjoyed breakfast at a hopping local diner called Nick & J’s Cafe, where I was able to indulge my love of country ham, something we don’t see enough of in the Chicago area, Mindy was able to order the strawberry pancakes of her dreams, and we both came to the table on an order of biscuits and gravy. The biscuits were excellent, the gravy a bit light on the sausage but tasty enough, and the overall vibe of the place very friendly.

It was… too much breakfast. Yes, I kept making bad food decisions. But by lunchtime we were able to pull up to the current location of the Sam & Andy’s deli mentioned in the Bitter Southerner article and order a steamed hoagie. Our host attempted to steer us toward the Reuben–a sandwich I’m very picky about–but I stuck to my guns and got the hoagie.

I had been waiting a long time to try this sandwich, but I had managed to keep my expectations in check. It was, after all, a fairly ordinary submarine-style sandwich, featuring ham and Genoa salami, Swiss cheese, mayonnaise and brown mustard, steamed to melt the cheese and served with a pickle wedge and an order of decent fries. I wasn’t expecting much.

I certainly didn’t expect the wave of nostalgia that hit me when I bit into it. I had never been within a hundred miles of Knoxville prior to that weekend. What right did this sandwich have to feel so familiar to me? But I knew immediately what it reminded me of. When I was younger, I’d often build a similar sandwich–ham, salami, Muenster cheese or maybe American, along with mustard and mayonnaise on whatever bread I happened to have, hoagie roll, brat bun, burger bun, even sliced bread. Then I’d wrap it tightly in aluminum foil and heat it in the oven for 15 or 20 minutes. The exterior of the resulting sandwich would be toasted and crisp, retaining retain torn-off bits of aluminum foil if you weren’t careful–that part was nothing like this. But the inside? Fats rendered from the cured meats combined with melted cheese, mayo, and mustard to create a sauce that would at least partially disintegrate the interior of the bread. The Knoxville-style hoagie steams from the outside in rather than the inside-out like that sandwich from my childhood but that oozing mixture of ham juices, melted cheese, and mustard brought me right back to my teens.

Next we visited a spot that seemed well-liked from 2021 hoagie thread I found at /r/Knoxville on Reddit, Subs & Such in Alcoa. There we ordered a 12″ beef hoagie on dark rye bread, featuring corned beef and salami. Where Sam & Andy’s had seemed to assume that a steamed hoagie should only have mayonnaise and mustard, with a pickle served on the side, Subs & Such offered a variety of vegetable fillings–onions, green peppers, lettuce, tomatoes, olives, etc. According to our cashier, onions and green peppers and the like were added before steaming but lettuce and tomato were only ever added after the steamer. We allowed them to talk us into adding lettuce after the sandwich’s steam bath.

The sandwich seemed to have spent very little time in the steamer despite its fully melted cheese, based on the slight lingering crispness of the bread’s crust. The bread had an attractive, deep brown color but no real spicy rye dryness and only a mild amount of the molasses flavor that an American Pumpernickel will usually feature. It was… OK. Only OK. We took a few bites, wrapped it up in a ziploc bag to bring with us, and moved on.

After those two sandwiches, we didn’t think we could eat again for a while, and our final planned stop of the day, the Korner Market about which Chelsey Mae Johnson reminisced so beautifully in her piece, had a posted closing time of 7pm, so we went on an adventure. We looked at the trains near the University campus. Mindy indulged me in a 45 minute drive to Benton’s Country Hams in Madisonville, where I acquired a deliciously smoky smelling ham to bring home. (The car had to be aired out afterwards) We noticed a spot on the map labeled “Top of the World” which turned out to be a small town on a spur of Chilhowee Mountain, accessible only via narrow, winding switchbacks with no railings, where everyone drives a massive American pickup truck. We found our way from there to Look Rock, a small public park offering a watchtower with panoramic vistas of the mountainous area as well as a stone ledge overlooking the neighboring valley.

Eventually we made our way back to South Knoxville, to Korner Market, and discovered that while the store itself was open, the kitchen had closed at 3pm and would not reopen until Monday morning. There is a limited window of opportunity for steamed hoagies, and it closes earlier than you might think most days.

So we did our bougie tourist thing again and made our way back to Market Square, where this time we’d had the foresight to make a reservation at J.C. Holdway, a full service New American restaurant that is a bit more upscale than the places I normally visit. However, their chef had the good sense to put smoked bologna sandwiches on the menu. It was like he knew I was coming. We also tried smoked chicken wings with Alabama white sauce, which has only reinforced my resolve to make my own version of white sauce again soon. My stuffed chicken and Mindy’s pork shoulder steak were both great dishes, the chicken of a quality I have rarely experienced, and the pork grilled to that sweet spot between too tough and falling-apart, where the meat still retains its shape but parts easily under one’s teeth. The chocolate toffee semifreddo Mindy ordered for dessert was also a delight, though it did not survive long enough for me to point a camera at it.

The next morning we checked out of our hotel to start our long drive home. But before we left town, we stopped at one more hoagie shop that Mindy had spotted on our sojourns around town, Nixon’s Deli. The most popular sandwich here was their Italian, featuring ham, salami, and pepperoni (where their regular hoagie only had ham and salami). We ordered it with provolone cheese and the standard mayo and mustard, and were provided pickle spears and pepperoncinis on the side.

The bread for this sandwich was good, fresh, and the meats were of a high quality as well, ham-off-the-bone sliced thinly and piled high atop a well-ordered base of salami and pepperoni slices. The sandwich was well-constructed, and if it had been steamed just a bit longer–if it had achieved that gloriously sloppy amalgam of meat fat and melted cheese and misplaced nostalgia that our very first hoagie of the weekend had nailed effortlessly–it would have been my favorite of the trip. But it didn’t spend quite long enough in the steamer, and the bread, while soft, was merely warm; the cheese, while melted, had not been fully liquidized; the pork fat, while rendered, was merely beading on the meat’s surface. The pickles were terrific though.

So I didn’t quite have the experience I had looked forward to–following a trail blazed by Chelsey Mae as she investigated the sandwich’s origins, seeing through my eyes what she’d captured so well with her words and experiencing it in much the same way. But I was never likely to. Context is everything, and I don’t have the personal history with the sandwich or the cultural background or the particular sense for Knoxville that she brought to the subject. It’s a bit of a minor miracle that I was able to connect so powerfully with one example of the sandwich–expecting that connection to span the entire weekend was silly of me. But I got to experience a new city with my wife, enjoy the natural beauty of eastern Tennessee, and have a few good sandwiches along the way. That’s not a bad weekend by any measure.