Notable Sandwiches #45: Chow Mein

Like a squid got trapped in its own blood

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the series in which I, alongside my editor David Swanson, stumble through the strange and ever-shifting document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week: a quirky, old-fashioned New England dish—the chow mein sandwich.

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Cthulhu on a bun

The List of Notable Sandwiches was never going to be an easy beast to wrangle. I knew that from the start—it’s mammoth, unwieldy, repetitive, wildly diverse, full of tantalizing stubs of articles and obscure regional specialties. Throughout the forty-odd essays David and I have served up to you, we’ve covered the bilious (bologna salad, anyone?), the baffling (the tangled tale of the Bosna comes to mind) and the blissful (banh mi!!!!) and managed to get through only two letters of the alphabet. Now fully ensconced in the C’s, I find myself in the untenable position of confronting the chow mein sandwich—a specialty in select southeastern New England towns, notably Fall River, Providence, New Bedford, Taunton, and other places whose heyday passed with the whaling industry.

The product of Chinese immigrants doing their best to cater to wary American palates in the early 20th century, the chow mein sandwich is a hybrid. Fried Chinese noodles slathered in New-England-style gravy, topped with a smattering of meatstuff, maybe some vegetables, and ladled onto a hamburger bun. Catholics that abided by traditions of fasting could opt for “strained,” meatless noodles on Fridays. The sandwich used to cost a nickel—by the 1930s, a quarter—and it was a real treat to Depression-era New Englanders, who could make the exotic-seeming dish stretch to a family meal, or even two.

I would love to tell you a story of immigrant striving; of the obstacles and occasional serendipities of the struggle to assimilate in America; of the way restaurants served as cultural outposts for Chinese-Americans for decades, seducing wary American palates, and allaying their often ferocious xenophobia, one sweetened-chicken morsel at a time. (If you want that story—and it is worth telling, retelling and absorbing, as sweet, sour and expansive as it is—I suggest you check out the marvelous Chop Suey: A Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States, by Andrew Coe, or the mouthwatering documentary The Search For General Tso.) All the elements of a truly great sandwich essay—migration, appropriation, regionality, change—are sitting under the surface of this tale, like gravy-soaked noodles congealing in a bun.

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But, dear reader, I am struggling to turn away from thing itself and towards its narrative potential. Here is the ugly truth: the chow mein sandwich, impossible to eat as a portable food despite its name, fills me with unspeakable revulsion. It looks like a squid got trapped in a sea of its own blood and was then cruelly forced to wear a bread yarmulke. It is the gore porn of sandwiches. It’s the sandwich version of Elon Musk-era Twitter—its own disintegration is contained within its limp and sagging form. It looks vaguely gynecological in an upsetting way.

To be clear, I think this says more about how far immigrants had to go to please narrow-minded 1930s New Englanders during the long winter of their discontent than it does about the striving newcomers dishing up big portions for a nickel. After all, this is the region that gave us Moxie Soda, aka “root beer, but bitter,” and the white-sauce abominations of the Boston Cooking School; perhaps it’s all the snow, or the residual influence of the Puritans, or the boosterish focus on boiled-dinner colonial nostalgia that have rendered the tastebuds of the great white north so dulled. I reserve this contempt principally for the New England of a century ago, whose residents were thin-lipped chowderheads intimidated by noodles sans accouterments; as far as their descendants go, everybody knows food nostalgia is an unstoppable, primal force that renders the unthinkable delicious.

What American Chinese food used to look like

Either way, I cannot mention—and deplore—the chow mein sandwich without drawing the shadow of its ghastlier, and even more regional, shadow twin, the chop suey sandwich. Next to the chop suey sandwich (which has a similar origin—depressive Depression food), the chow mein sandwich looks like a lush delicacy; insofar as these sandwiches are twins, one of them definitely tried to eat the other in the womb. Jacob and Esau pale and clasp hands, the lentil incident forgotten. 

The chop suey sandwich is also around a century old, and is only found in Salem, Massachusetts. It is the singular weakness of otherwise stellar reporter and human being Ben Collins, and looks even more like a trapped squid, or perhaps a nightmarish kraken creature straight out of the works of famous New Englander H.P. Lovecraft. (New literary theory: the chop suey sandwich inspired Cthulhu.) Its chief ingredient: Bean sprouts enrobed in the cornstarch of their own torment. 

I mean. Just look at it. So gray. So wet. So haunting. 

An even-rarer specimen: the chop suey sandwich

Moist. Tentacular. Engorged with its own fluids. Lunch!

Fundamentally—like the dirty pinko commie lib I am—I blame America for these afterbirth-on-a-bun abominations. After all, we are a people who, on first encountering the iconic sesame oil, soy and allium base of Chinese dishes in the 1780s, decided it was “the repose of putrefied garlic upon a much-used blanket” and smelled of rancid oil. It would take centuries and a history of horrific racial violence against Asians for that prejudice to even budge. No wonder the immigrant restaurateurs of struggling New England towns hugging the merciless cold sea produced sandwiches that look absolutely ready to bite back. And drag you into the inky deep. And never regret it.

Have a great weekend!

Tal