Notable Sandwich #91: Italian Beef
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my long-suffering editor David Swanson, trek through the enormous and unwieldy document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a Chicago special: the Italian Beef.
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The Italian Beef is a majestic sandwich, a great pile of roast beef on a hero roll anointed—and this is crucial—with an array of Italian seasonings. Chief among these, a melange of flavor, filling and texture, is giardiniera, which true to its name is a veritable garden of pickled and preserved vegetables: bell peppers, cauliflower, celery, carrots and gherkins, all impregnated with spice.
Do you know what else is impregnated with spice? The desert planet of Arrakis, the central location for Frank Herbert’s insane space-opera masterpiece Dune, whose most recent film adaptation came out at the beginning of this month, in a fantastically detailed, brilliantly acted, lushly aesthetic vision of a movie directed by Dennis Villeneuve. I recently finished the insane tunnel-vision work-fugue of incorporating every single copy-editing, fact-checking and legal-review change into my manuscript (my second book is coming out October 8), and, bereft of both an immediate gigantic project and most of my sanity, decided to immediately plunge into Dune, with a will. I did this to the neglect of everything, including sleeping, eating and researching the Italian beef sandwich. Anyway, in the Dune universe (or Duniverse), spice—a psychoactive material made from the dead bodies of enormous sand-worms—is the most important substance in the universe. Computers have been banished by a long-ago event known as the Butlerian Jihad, and thus only spice can grant the prescience necessary to allow navigators to guide interstellar travel. Onto this vital but volatile planet are dropped the family Atreides, figures pregnant (at times literally) with destiny. Thanks to a millennia-long effort from a consortium of eugenics-minded space witches, our hero/antihero Paul Atreides is gifted with a mind which, once unlocked by the worm drug, gains “trinocular” focus that can encompass the present, the past and the future, granting him the gift—and the trap—of prescience. The words “terrible purpose” are repeated a lot of times in the first book. As a result, Paul is destined among other things to spend many, many chapters tripping on enormous quantities of this worm juice.
Juice—or jus—is a critical ingredient in the Italian beef sandwich; depending on preferences, an eater can choose to have their sandwich dipped, dunked or “baptized” with jus, a delicate beef gravy with analogues in numerous cuisines. This sandwich emerged out of the Italian immigrant community in Chicago, although as with so many other sandwiches, its origins are shrouded in mystery (possibly it was invented by a line-cook named Tony; possibly by a street-peddler of lunches; possibly by no named individual at all; but at any rate, dating back to sometime between the 1920s and 1940s and subject to considerable evolution over the intervening decades.) It makes sense that this marriage of beef and spice came out of Chicago, the erstwhile slaughterhouse capital of the country, once so redolent of corpses the air was fetid with flesh and a continual line of doomed animals crossed an enormous ramp to the slaughterhouse district known as the “Bridge of Sighs.” Once our ancestors tamed the aurochs, the near-mythic Pleistocene megafauna that was the mammoth ancestor of today’s cattle, it was only a matter of time before slaughter was massed and mechanized and turned into a colossal array of sandwiches served at meat temples like the iconic Mr. Beef.
Speaking of taming gigantic beasts, one of the most iconic moments of Paul Atreides’ journey to become both messiah and antihero—both in Villeneuve’s Dune 2 and in David Lynch’s 1984 film adaptation—is his conquest of the gigantic sandworm, known in the tongue of the desert tribesmen the Fremen as Shai-Hulud, the old man of the desert, who is worshipped, ridden, and, as mentioned before, routinely killed for its trippy drug-essence by the Fremen. Paul surfs the desert on Shai-Hulud’s back, becoming master of the arid plain and moving towards a terrible destiny that he can see but not avert. As the planetary ecologist Liet-Kynes says in Villeneuve’s movie (which cuts out a lot of Frank Herbert’s pretentious, dorky dialogue), “I serve but one master and his name is Shai-Hulud!” In order to destroy the Imperial soldiers who have just mortally wounded her, she pounds her fist on the sand, because the worms are attracted to rhythmic movement, the sound of prey. (This is also the source of a lyric in one of my favorite songs, “Weapon of Choice” by Fatboy Slim: “Walk without rhythm, it won’t attract the worm.” Christopher Walken dances lithely in the iconic music video, unaware that 23 years later, he would be playing the role of the Padishah Emperor of the known universe in Dune 2. If only he had trinocular prescience brought on by worm tripping!)
While we're on the topic of iconic cultural moments, the Italian beef sandwich has had a such a breakthrough recently with the prestige TV show “The Bear,” a critically-acclaimed show about an Italian beef sandwich shop run by Gene Wilder lookalike Jeremy Allen-White. Apparently there’s a lot of drama and beautiful people dealing with debt, drugs, mold, trauma, addiction, and sandwiches. I was too busy reading Dune to get to it, although David told me it’s great and it won a zillion Emmys. It’s definitely caused an Italian beef renaissance, as the culturati who are into prestige television shows have decided that this humble pile of flesh now deserves their attention.
You know who else is a humble pile of flesh? Paul “Muad’Dib” “Lisan Al-Ghaib” “Usul” Atreides, after he abandons his responsibilities as emperor of the universe and walks, blinded, into the desert at the end of the series’ second book. Except—psych! He’s not! In book 3, Children of Dune, he comes back to bother his son, who is also hyper-prescient because of the amount of worm drugs his mother consumed before birth, and his sister, who is possessed by the spirit of her demonic maternal grandfather because she also suffered from the effects of worm drugs in the womb. (Don’t do worm drugs while you’re pregnant. You will produce freaky babies that can talk and see the future before they’re out of diapers.) His son decides to become a super-strong, nigh-immortal worm-human hybrid and becomes God-Emperor of the universe for four thousand years. God-Emperor of Dune is the book I’m currently up to, although I am slightly dubious that my remaining sanity will survive it, because Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s son/hagiographer/officially sanctioned fanfic-prequel writer, has described it as having “many pages of dialogue,” more than the other books. This gives me pause, because none of Frank Herbert’s dialogue makes any sense. His imagination was phenomenal, the Dune world is both extremely far-out and highly detailed and realized, but on a sentence level, the writing is often deeply painful, the dialogue in particular. People keep making garbled philosophical statements, everyone interrupts one another, and all of this obscures the extremely delicious and bizarro space drama unfolding, and it’s really annoying. (I’ve started God-Emperor and eleven people have been eaten by wolves in the first ten pages, so I’m kind of excited, though).
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Much like hapless rebels pursued by D-Wolves over the Sareer desert, I feel eaten–with guilt about neglecting a masterpiece of Midwestern cuisine, given that it’s so often shat upon by the rest of the country. The Italian beef is a delectably far cry from other Midwestern specialties, like ambrosia salad or the unholy cinnamon-spaghetti hybrid known as “Cincinnati chili”. Chicago is an island of deliciousness in the center of the country, producing its masterpieces with jus but not the justice they are due. The combination of pickling spices, beef roasted to perfection, the trencher-ish soaking properties of a French roll and the sheer juiciness involved in an Italian Beef makes my mouth water like the Chicago River, which stretches all the way from Lake Michigan to the Gulf of Mexico. Despite my inherent New York provincialism, which functions as a kind of prosopagnosia for internal US geography, even I know the difference between Illinois and Idaho—you go to the former for transcendent beef sandwiches, whereas the latter’s most iconic dish is “Rocky mountain oysters” (fried bull testicles).
Idaho, however, remains vitally important even ten thousand years in the future, in the person of Paul Atreides’ swashbuckling companion Duncan Idaho (played by Jason Momoa in the movies with a guttural mumble and impressive cape-wearing). The name of Duncan Idaho is a little bit weird in the context of everything else going on (everyone else has names like Baron Harkonnen, Shaddam IV, Leto Atreides, the Bene Gesserit, Stilgar, Thufir Hawat et al) but that’s far from the weirdest thing about him. He’s just this dude who dies in the first book and then keeps getting resurrected as a golem. He shows up in every single book and keeps getting reincarnated with metal eyes. Even he is confused as to why he simply cannot die in the Dune universe. Perhaps he is too sexy to die (at one point, the sight of Duncan Idaho scaling a wall causes a woman to orgasm), or perhaps the Atreides lineage, no matter how distorted by worm-human hybridization and space eugenics, simply cannot resist having their own private Idaho.
Do I sound mildly frenzied? Very well then, I am mildly frenzied, I contain multitudes. I really can’t tell you how much time this week I spent reading and watching Dune and Dune-related materials (for a similar ranting tone I recommend listening to Henry Zebrowski’s manic podcast miniseries LPN Deep Dives: Dune). As the books progress, Herbert lets both his garbled philosophy run free (bad) and his imagination go wild (absolutely bananas, extremely entertaining). After the second book, the imaginative faculty remains pristine while the writing quality drops off a goddamn cliff into hell. I’ll tell you the precise moment I decided to turn this Italian Beef column into a generalized rant about how weird, frustrating, addicting, trippy and magnificent Dune is: the moment beef intruded on the text in the most horrendous way possible.
The context: a prescient nine-year-old with the consciousnesses of thousands of ancestors including the ancient Greek warrior Agamemnon is being held captive and repeatedly overdosed on the aforementioned worm-drug, in an effort by his grandmother to determine whether he is truly human or an Abomination that must be killed according to the doctrine of the space eugenics witches. This is our original hero Paul’s son, Leto II, future worm emperor of the universe. Here he is tripping balls in Children of Dune:
The pressure of his multi-memories exploded the time-frozen englobement which he had tried to resist. He felt twining bodies, the sounds of sex, rhythms laced in every sensory impression: lips, breathing, moist breaths, tongues. Somewhere in his vision there were helix shapes, coal-colored, and he felt the beat of those shapes as they turned within him. A voice pleaded in his skull: “Please, please, please, please…” There was an adult beefswelling in his loins and he felt his mouth open, holding, clinging to the girder-shape of ecstasy. Then a sigh, a lingering groundswelling sweetness, a collapse.
Who among us has not felt a beefswelling in our englobement? What is a girder-shape of ecstasy? Can I please ride a giant worm across the space desert? Will I ever be able to memorize the Litany Against Fear in a useful way or is it just too long to be any help against panic attacks?
At least it wasn’t Italian beefswelling.
This has been a dispatch from an unhealthy, Dune-pilled mind. Please, go eat a sandwich, and touch some grass for me.
I love you all, praise Shai-Hulud,
Talia
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