Notable Sandwiches #87: The Horseshoe
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my long-suffering editor David Swanson, wend my way through the ever-shifting document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, on the heels of Presidents' Day, an Illinois special: the horseshoe sandwich.
Springfield, Illinois, is known for two things: being the “hometown” of Abraham Lincoln (he lived there for almost two decades, plus he’s buried there, so I guess it’s his hometown for eternity, also), and the horseshoe sandwich. I mean, it’s known for other things, too, like being the state capital and the home of the annual Illinois State Fair. But for the purposes of this column, we’re going to stick to Lincoln, and the horseshoe sandwich, which, again for the purposes of this column, are subjects of equal import—indeed, perhaps even interwoven in their significance. Or will be for the next thousand words or so.
Springfield isn’t the only American town that has a claim on Lincoln; he was born 215 years and eleven days ago in Kentucky, where he spent his early childhood on Sinking Spring Farm (this sounds like a depressing place to live); he wasn’t quite the impoverished backwoods urchin later biographies would describe, the better to signal the extraordinary nature of his rise to power, but his father eventually kicked over the traces after getting screwed out of cash by Kentucky courts. The family hightailed it to Indiana, where little Lincoln lived from ages seven to twenty-one in the equally ill-named Hurricane Township. By age twenty-eight, after stints as a riverman, rail-splitter, salesman, soldier, postman, and surveyor, the ambitious young man had become a self-taught lawyer (the best kind), and hung out his shingle in Springfield.
Just shy of a hundred years later, in the 1920s, a chef named Joe Schweska invented the Horseshoe sandwich at the swanky Red Lion Room, part of Springfield’s Leland Hotel. The sandwich was named for its shape: originally, it consisted of a piece of bread topped with a slice from a bone-in ham—shaped like a horseshoe—with eight potato wedges arrayed on the plate as the “nails” in the horseshoe, and the whole thing smothered in a generous portion of a sharp-cheddar Welsh Rarebit cheese sauce. Modern horseshoes have proliferated throughout the region, and by all accounts lack a lot of the original’s panache; it’s a gigantic platter of Texas toast, meat of differing kinds, fries, and molten cheese sauce. Still, it’s a defiantly claimed regional specialty, and somewhat better than other facts listed as advertisements for the city (one very boosterish list boasts that Springfield “has taxis” and “It's Close To Large Cities (But Not Too Close)”, so sandwich-based pride makes comparative sense).
Abraham Lincoln was a very eloquent guy, and he was also a very weird-looking guy. I mean, beauty standards in the nineteenth century were pretty lax (all your own teeth? No bullet holes in your face? No oozing syphilis sores? A total babe!) but he is undeniably misshapen, even in green on a five-dollar bill. (That’s the price of a paid subscription to this newsletter, by the way!) He was very tall, had a protuberant forehead and cadaverous cheekbones, and famously grew a beard because an eleven-year-old girl wrote him a letter telling him “if you let your whiskers grow… you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” and he stopped shaving immediately to hide his weird gaunt face.
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The horseshoe sandwich is also very weird-looking. While food photography varies widely, I have yet to see a picture of this sandwich that doesn’t make it look as if it was extruded by some sort of sea creature, adorned with secretions and sallow French fries. (There’s a version from Iowa that substitutes the ham with something called “steamed loose meat,” which various politicians have been photographed with in rictus-grimaces of feigned enjoyment.) Like Cthulhu in the deep, the bread and ham/loose meat lurk beneath the surface of an oozy layer of oily starch swimming in cheez sludge. I am not sure it would be improved by a beard.
For decades, historians have hotly debated Lincoln’s sexuality. There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence that he was gay, notably his habit of sharing a bed with “close friend” Joshua Speed, whom he met while the latter was serving as the clerk of Springfield’s general store, and who generously offered to share a bed with Lincoln as the impoverished lawyer sought lodgings. They shared that double bed for four years. Much can be handwaved away by the passionate homosocial relationships more common among men in the nineteenth century, and the sharing of beds being not uncommon, but four years is a very long time to platonically co-sleep, especially as they were not aboard a ship or roughing it in some sort of rustic hut situation; Lincoln was literally a state legislator at the time. Also, an earlier “friend” with whom Lincoln had also shared a bed in nearby New Salem, Illinois, commented admiringly that Lincoln was "well and firmly built: his thighs were as perfect as a human being could be." (C.A. Tripp, the Kinsey Institute researcher and author of the controversial and deeply horny work The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, argues quite emphatically that Lincoln was very gay indeed, mentions that this may be a reference to “femoral intercourse,” aka thigh-humping).
The horseshoe sandwich, by contrast, is the most heterosexual thing I’ve ever seen in my life. If you had to, at gunpoint, gastronomically depict the suffocating prison of heteronormativity, and particularly the Procrustean bed of heterosexual masculinity, you couldn’t do much better (/worse) than the sandwich that has fed back-slapping Illinois politicos for almost a century. There is nothing queer about this sandwich. It looks like it’s about to yell at you for being “woke” and if it had a mouth, it would use it to make a bigoted “joke” about pronouns. It has no thighs at all.
Lincoln’s martyrdom by assassination has heightened his already central role in American history, and rendered even the smallest details of his life mythic, fodder for doorstop-sized biographies from his day to our own. “As a nation of freemen we must live through all time,” he said in an 1838 speech in Springfield, “or die by suicide.” By all accounts he was a deeply melancholy man, and he outlived all but one of his children; he was sometimes ruthless with his power, sometimes too appeasing in his early politics. His life and deeds were not flawless, but the path Booth’s bullet took made him, paradoxically, unassailable in the way that martyrs are. The tragic dead offer one clarion note, though people, especially presidents, are complicated. Overall, being The Great Emancipator and leading a bloody struggle for freedom, then dying for it at the hands of an egomaniacal Southern actor, rightfully washes away far more ignominy than he ever earned.
You could probably assassinate someone by forcing them to eat only horseshoe sandwiches in a kind of demented SuperSize Me experiment, although it would take a lot longer than a bullet, and involve spending a lot more time at Illinois gastropubs. I suppose you could entomb your enemy in French fries, as the sandwich itself is entombed—although they could probably eat their way out or at least eat enough of an air hole to avoid an Aida-type situation of living immurement. Such an escape, however, would be impeded by the viscosity of the cheese sauce, which would pinion the limbs, and perhaps even coat the face of the would-be victim. While I still don’t recommend it as an efficient method of assassination (this newsletter does not condone murder of any kind, actually), it would be a remarkably specific vengeance against someone from Springfield. You could also tie horseshoe-sandwich platters to their feet and sink them off Marine Point Park, which ventures in a sweeping jut into Lake Springfield and is an excellent place to hang out during a humid summer, maybe fish a little, but not too deep! You might accidentally resurface your drowned enemy! Talk about a bone-in ham!
Hope you enjoyed this installment of Notable Sandwiches, flawed as it was doomed to be from the outset (yes, it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools, but the horseshoe sandwich didn’t give me a ton to work with). Or, as Abraham Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1842: "I now have no doubt that it is the particular misfortune of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that anything earthly can realize."
Be gay do sandwich crimes,
Talia
