Fall River’s Physics-Defying Hot Cheese Sandwich

I can’t always track when I learned about a sandwich down to a specific day or time or occasion or source. Some are easy–many of the sandwiches in the oft-mentioned 2003 documentary Sandwiches That You Will Like, for example. The St. Paul sandwich. The Hot Brown. Chipped chopped ham. But there are plenty of sandwiches mentioned in that documentary that I clearly already knew about, well-known sandwiches like the Philadelphia cheesesteak, or local sandwiches like the Italian Beef. But the Hot Cheese sandwich served at hot dog stands in Fall River, MA? I know exactly where and approximately when I learned about that one. It was around 3 years ago, from this article:

The article has been online since 2017 but I didn’t see it and add this sandwich to our List until June of 2021, though I believe I’d first read about it earlier that year and had held off on adding it. I certainly had it on my mind much of that year, as a month later I quizzed friend of the site Titus Ruscitti, who was visiting Fall River, on whether he planned to try the hot cheese sandwich while he was there.

tell me you're gonna get a hot cheese sandwich while you're there

— Sandwich Death Panel Czar (@JimBehymer) July 17, 2021

Of course, nobody needs to tell Titus where the good stuff is–he was well aware of the hot cheese sandwich and was planning on trying it along with a slew of other local food specialties that weren’t even on my radar. Despite being a relatively small city (population around 93,000), Fall River has its own foodways and a number of unique sandwiches and hot dogs, a couple of which have been covered here previously: the chow mein sandwich and the Portuguese-American Caçoila, for example, along with the different hot dog styles Titus mentioned–the local style of coney dog, the bean dog, the chouriço dog.

I too have wanted for years to visit Fall River and try some of the local sandwiches in their native habitat. The hot cheese sandwich gave me an excuse to make it happen. Fall River wasn’t incorporated as a town until 1803, but had previously been considered part of either nearby Freetown, MA or Tiverton, RI, and the area as a whole was among the first in mainland North America to be settled by Europeans–it is only around 30 miles southwest of Plymouth, famous landing site of the Mayflower. Over the course of the 19th Century and up until the beginning of World War I, immigrants came to Fall River–Portuguese immigrants from the Azores, French Canadians, the English. In the 1870s and 1880s they were joined by Polish immigrants fleeing the Tsar and Irish immigrants escaping the famine. They came to work the textile mills of Fall River, which by the end of the 19th Century were providing the majority of printed cloth produced in the US. They came to work the fishing boats, or the whaling boats, as domestic servants, laundresses, or seamstresses, and they brought their cultures and foodways with them. Many of these influences can still be easily traced in the diversity of cuisine Fall River boasts today.

But a trip to Fall River offered more than just the opportunity to visit that one town. In the Midwest where I live, we are notorious for thinking nothing of a drive of several hours, since often that is how long it takes to get to the next sizable city–for instance, Milwaukee is only 2 hours from Chicago; Indianapolis 3 hours; St. Louis and Detroit each around 5. But in the northeast, everything is right on top of each other. In addition to Plymouth, Fall River is only a 45 minute drive from Sandwich, Massachusetts, which has nothing to do with sandwiches but will make a good photo op; or Quincy, MA, which is what most people think of when I tell them I’m from Quincy (in Illinois); an hour from Boston, where there are any number of good things to see and delicious things to eat; 90 minutes from Salem, home of the Chop Suey sandwich, and the rest of the North Shore, home of the 3-Way Roast Beef that we’ll be writing about later this year. Beyond Massachusetts, it’s only 45 minutes from Woonsocket, Rhode Island, home of the Dynamite, which 8+ years later continues to be one of the most-read sandwich articles on this site.

So Mindy and I decided to fly into Boston, rent a car, and see all those places, eat many of the sandwiches that I’d only made at home before or perhaps had not yet tried at all.

Road Trip

When we travel to a new city, usually we like to stay in a neighborhood and live like locals for a few days, get around via the local transit options, do a lot of walking. The area around Boston provided such a target-rich environment though that we opted to instead stay in a less expensive hotel in Boston’s suburbs–Lexington to be precise, where we met some very nice folks at the hotel bar, hello again if you see this!–and rent a car so we’d have the flexibility to travel to the spots we wanted to see.

Spot #1, which we drove directly to after leaving the airport, was Graham’s in Fall River, the place usually cited when folks talk about the hot cheese sandwich.

When we pulled up to Graham’s and I saw the faded, handpainted sign hanging over the tiny storefront, the wood-paneled interior, the old-fashioned, yellowing menu board with only a few items listed on it, the quirky decor including a sun-bleached photo of JFK and a painting of the actual dining room we were present in but with the back half of a tiger added to spice things up, I knew this was a place for me.

What I excitedly said out loud was, “This place looks like a shithole!” But the smile on my face was huge and real and I meant that seeming disparagement in the most positive way possible. Graham’s belongs to a class of old-school restaurant that includes places like the Big Apple Inn in Jackson, Mississippi; the 1920s era Maid-Rite in my hometown of Quincy, IL; Moon’s Sandwich Shop in Chicago before they remodeled it. These places each oozed character, in a very literal way, and so does Graham’s. It is quite clean and comfortable but has a very lived-in feel.

Between Mindy and I, we ordered a hot cheese sandwich, a Coney dog, a Whimpie burger, an order of their “fresh-cut” fries, and a cup of coffee milk. I’ve become a little hooked on coffee milk over the past week or two–in and around Rhode Island, they sell squeeze bottles of coffee-flavored syrup, much like the Hershey’s chocolate syrup you might squeeze over your ice cream or mix into milk to make chocolate milk. Only it’s coffee flavored. I brought a bottle of Autocrat brand coffee syrup home with me and so far lightning has not struck in terms of inspired uses for it–I’ve made coffee milk, yes, and poured it over ice cream, and I mixed a little into Chai to make an even dirtier Chai latte–a filthy Chai latte?–and I’ve tried mixing it into the milk I steamed for a cappuccino but the coffee syrup did not stand out in that context. But you’re not hear to read about my dumb ideas for coffee syrup.

I ordered the hot cheese sandwich with mustard, onion, pickle relish, and coney sauce. The cheese is an oddity. It’s a sharp white cheddar, that much is plain from the flavor, and the texture is more cheeselike than saucelike. But it melts without separating and remains soft after cooling rather than hardening into something cheddarlike. When we were there, two employees were working, a younger woman and one perhaps a little older than myself. I asked the older of the two, “what do you do to this cheese to make it stay soft like that?”

“I can’t tell you,” she replied.

I joked back, “OK, well I wouldn’t want you to have to kill me.”

“No chance of that,” she said, “’cause I’m not telling.”

There wasn’t much to it: a soft, standard white hamburger bun cradling a lump of cheese that by any measure should have either oozed straight out of the bun–which it did to some extent but not nearly as much as you’d think a cheese sauce should–or should have been lumpy and uneven and at least partially hard, which it was not at all. It was soft, it tasted like cheese, the mouthfeel was cheeselike, it had the sharpness of cheddar punctuated by the savory Coney sauce and the pungent bites of pickle, onion, and mustard. It shouldn’t have worked but it did. It was quite a puzzlement.

I had a little more luck asking how they made it at J.J.’s Coney Island, when I ordered their version of the hot cheese sandwich.

J.J.’s is a slightly bigger place, a little temore up-to-date: color-printed, laminated signs instead of hand-written, a newer, shinier menu board, bright fresh-finished booths. Here I ordered the hot cheese sandwich with onion, mustard and relish, no coney sauce. I also noticed that they served a Caçoila sandwich, something we covered last year, and I requested one of those to confirm how well I did. Mindy requested the kale soup, another local delicacy owed to the prominent Portuguese-American population of the town.

The cheese sandwich was similar to Graham’s, though I think that leaving off the coney sauce is the right choice–mustard, relish, and onion each complement the rich cheese in their own fashion, mustard pungent and sour to cut through the richness of the cheese, onion sharp and crisp to give some texture and bite, and the relish, sweet and sour to temper the bite of the mustard and onion. There may not be much to this sandwich, but it has all the flavors you could ask for.

And when I asked the helpful gentleman behind the counter at J.J.’s how they get the cheese to stay so soft, even as it cools, he gave me an answer–sort of. He said, “I don’t know! I just cube it up and melt it.”

There were a few other spots in Fall River where the hot cheese sandwich is served, but there was a lot more to do on this trip. So much more that I think the additional regional specialties we tried deserve their own writeup. There’s a lot of good things to eat in and around Massachusetts, so if you’d like to see what else we tried, you’ll find it there.

DIY

So while Graham’s was cagey about their cheese prep, J.J.’s was open with us: apparently they order a special melting cheese for the hot cheese sandwich, and all they have to do is cut it up into cubes and heat it up. Would I be able to make my own secret-recipe meltable sharp white cheddar cheese, to cube up and melt and make my own hot cheese sandwiches?

Sure I could, and I could make a coney sauce to serve on top of it. My suspicion is that the cheese was stabilized with a starch much like a mornay sauce or the kind of cheese sauce that uses evaporated milk and pre-shredded cheese along with the cornstarch it’s coated in. I started with a bechamel using 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp flour, and 1/2 cup whole milk, then melted 20 ounces of sharp white cheddar into it.

After the very thick cheese sauce was ready, I lined a loaf pan with plastic wrap, poured the cheese sauce in, and refrigerated it overnight. I ended up with a solid, processed white cheddar cheese that should be able to remelt and be used for sandwiches.

However, there is a caveat: you can’t remelt this cheese too fast, over too high a heat, and you want to stir it frequently while it’s melting. Once the sauce breaks and the fats separate, even if you can get the fat to be reabsorbed it’ll forever have a gritty texture. In the words of the Beastie Boys, “Slow and low, that is the tempo.” Sadly, when I reheated the sauce I made this mistake, so the texture wasn’t as smooth as what I had hoped for. But the flavor was all sharp cheddar, and it was complemented well by the mustard and pickle relish and onion, and I even liked the Coney sauce this time around.

Is it exactly like what I had in Fall River? Not quite. The cheese I used is a little sharper than what they use, so it had a stronger, saltier cheese flavor. But I can live with that.