Pittsburgh’s Chipped Chopped Ham Sandwiches

Isaly’s is–or was, I suppose. No, let’s say it still is–a chain of delis around the Pittsburgh area. But there used to be much more to the story. A book published in 2021 by the Heinz History Center traces Isaly’s origins, from an immigrant dairy farm in Eastern Ohio in the 1830s to a chain of ice cream shops expanding into the Pittsburgh market in the 1930s and becoming a staple of Pittsburgh life for the middle section of the 20th Century. Isaly’s invented the Klondike bar; Isaly’s was the home of the Skyscraper Cone; Isaly’s was where you stopped for a snack after a movie or a night on the town. At one point there were around 100 Isaly’s locations in the Pittsburgh area, but their fortunes had begun to dwindle by the 1980s. The Klondike Bar brand was sold to a company called Clabir in the mid-70s and eventually ended up with Good Humor. Due to the loose franchising structure, some locations broke off and rebranded themselves as “Sweet William’s” or as “Isaly Shoppe.” But the most lasting legacy of the company appears to be the deli business, sold off to a company called Delicatessen Distributing Incorporated, under which the “Chipped Chopped Ham” and Barbecue sauces that fill Pittsburgh’s beloved Chipped Ham Sandwiches were and are made.

There are still 3 open Isaly’s locations located in the Pittsburgh area according to Wikipedia and to Google Maps. (Google Maps also shows a location in Stow, Ohio as of August 2023) The location in West View, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, was featured in the 2002 documentary Rick Sebak made for Pittsburgh’s PBS affiliate WQED, Sandwiches That You Will Like, a documentary that I’ve cited before as one of the inspirations behind the Sandwich Tribunal. The section on Isaly’s starts at about 27:57 in the linked YouTube video. A range of Isaly’s products are available at grocery stores across Western Pennsylvania, much of Ohio, and even a single location in Indiana, but the deli products specifically–the barbecue sauce and the chopped ham–can be ordered online from the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, which is how I got my hands on them.

To almost anyone outside of Pittsburgh, I think, a chipped ham sandwich would look like a struggle meal. It features ham from a processed, pressed, shape loaf called “Chopped Ham.” That ham is “chipped,” or shaved translucently thin, to the point where it begins to shred. The product is sold as “chipped chopped ham” or sometimes referred to by locals as “chip chop” ham. The ham is thrown into a pan and “frizzle fried” before being mixed with a thin barbecue sauce and served in toasted buns. According to the WQED documentary, the buns at Isaly’s are exceptional, light and airy, baked on-premises. Of course those of us playing along at home can make do with some decent potato rolls toasted in a pan.

To folks from Pittsburgh, though–or as the documentary delicately put it, “among Pittsburghers of a certain age”–the chipped ham sandwich is a nostalgic favorite, a taste of a bygone childhood, perhaps. The chipped ham sandwich in its most common form is this, chipped ham in sauce served in a toasted bun. I suppose you could top it with a condiment like pickle relish or some chopped onion but many people eat it just like this.

There is not much to the barbecue sauce. It’s thin, as I mentioned, and tastes very much like ketchup thinned out with some water and vinegar. There may be something to that. Older Isaly’s advertisements provided a recipe for a sauce that looked like this:

Though that figure of 14 to 16 sandwiches per pound of ham seems suspect, the sauce recipe sounds very much like what I experienced out of the yellow-label Isaly’s jar. Still, not much is required of the sauce other than to hold the ham together and provide a bit of a sweet/sour/savory boost. The star here is the thinly-shaved ham, which is not remarkable but salty and juicy and tender, swimming in a mix of this mild tomatoey sauce and its own rendered juices. The red label jar, their spicy barbecue sauce, was not much different but had a significant cayenne pepper heat. Not overpowering but hotter than I thought it would be after the mildness of the yellow label.

Shane Speal, an author, musician ,and cigar box guitar enthusiast with a significant following on multiple social media platforms, reached out to me when he saw that I was covering chipped ham this month to offer his own family’s homespun struggle meal version of this sandwich. “I grew up in Western PA. Chipped ham is EVERYTHING out there. More popular than any other lunch meat.” But “barbecue sauce,” he assures me, “was for rich people.” How did Shane’s family make these sandwiches? “Straight up ketchup and chopped ham, heated up in our smallest sauce pan and globbed onto Town Talk white bread. (Western PA squishy white bread.) Makes me drool thinking about it. Throw some potato chips inside if you got em, my way of ‘adding caviar’ to an already perfect mix.”

Well I did not bother trying to find Town Talk white bread and simply used the slightly fancier version of squishy white bread I had at home, but I can report that not only was this version great, but Heinz ketchup–because what else would you use in Western Pennsylvania (or anywhere else for that matter)–has significantly more flavor than Isaly’s Barbecue Sauce, believe it or not. Though adding a little of Isaly’s Spicy Barbecue Sauce to the ketchup was a good way to give the sandwich a little kick.

At this point, I have used up all the Isaly’s Chipped Chopped Ham that I ordered, and I haven’t even made the “Slammer” sandwich mentioned in the Rick Sebak documentary, which looked to be frizzle-fried chipped chopped ham topped with American cheese and grilled onions. It sounds pretty good to me, but I might just have to make a pilgrimage to Pittsburgh to try it, as I have done with the St. Paul sandwich and the Hot Brown and many others. Some things should be tasted on their home turf and right or wrong, the subjects of Sandwiches That You Will Like are, to me, the top of that list.