Notable Sandwiches #73: The Gerber

A St. Louis delicacy that I cannot bring myself to give a shit about

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, trip merrily through the bizarre and mutable document that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, a St. Louis specialty: the Gerber.

---

I do not, despite all my efforts, give a single shit about the Gerber sandwich.

I tried. I went through and looked at some timeless classics set in St. Louis (like Meet Me in St. Louis, or the 1868 speculative-fiction dime novel The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward S. Ellis, which went on to influence a great many later works). I thought about my own visit to St. Louis over a decade ago, in particular the bizarre experience of strolling through a museum dedicated to the conquest of America (it’s got an exhibit called “Manifest Destiny,” still), and going up to the top of the St. Louis Arch on the same vertiginous swoop of a visit. The Mississippi wide and slug-brown, licking at the waterfront bars. 

I thought about how little I know this country and how often the Midwest gets dismissed, mocked, ignored. About the terrible racial divisions that cleave St. Louis and its environs and their grim history, the precise kind elided by the gleaming exhibits in the museum at the foot of the great arch, that fat smirk upended in metal. I thought about Ferguson and tear gas and conquest and brutality and the Great Plains and what a provincial little stranger I am on these enormous shores.

I thought about how to distill all this down into a story at least nominally hooked on a sandwich, the Gerber, which is an open-faced hot sandwich made with ham, paprika, and a locally beloved processed-cheese product called Provel.

I determined, at last, that I simply cannot meet this moment in St. Louis, or anywhere else.

Thus far I have treated the project of documenting these sandwiches with a seriousness that overmatches the topic, in ways that are sometimes comic, sometimes overheated, and sometimes, I hope, genuinely surprising and enlightening. There are so many things I’ve quit in my lifetime and regret: I never learned to play the trumpet in elementary school (fickle and grossed out by spit valves); I never finished my podcast documenting Moby-Dick chapter by chapter, which was called “Moby Dick Energy,” and which only got up to Chapter 57 (getting a new guest each week, editing the audio, and paying for it all out of pocket got extremely wearing). I have an unfinished novel sitting in my Docs folder scorching me whenever I see its name.

I am determined not to flame out on this project. I want to get through this monster of a list and speak it to its end. I want my readers hungry and educated, a dangerous mix.

---

The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription:

---

And yet I cannot summon any enthusiasm at all at this moment, particularly not for yet another fucking variant on ham and cheese. I do not presently have it in me to delve into Midwest regional history by means of a tenuous culinary connection. The story is uninspiring: the sandwich was invented in 1973 in a St. Louis deli called Ruma’s by a tire-store owner and frequent customer named Dick Gerber. Ruma’s is litigiously possessive of the Gerber, despite its spread to other eateries in the area, and has apparently sent out cease and desist orders to anyone who dares to claim the name. 

Hurrah for Dick, for Ruma’s, for the legal tangle of trying to copyright a sandwich. You tire me unto fatigue and beyond it.

Moreover Provel, the “cheese” involved, sounds palatable at best (it’s a kind of white American cheese, a processed blend of provolone, Swiss and cheddar) and/or possibly disgusting. The journalist Alan Greenblatt, writing for NPR, said that “For me, eating raw Provel is akin to chewing on a candle that's lit at the other end.” 

Provel, the “cheese” that binds St. Louis together

It has the “sheen of wax” and “tastes like smoke” and people from St. Louis love it dearly, according to both national and local media; it’s largely unknown outside the region. Although there’s a trendy pizzeria in Brooklyn that serves it, too, apparently. I do not give a shit. You cannot make me give a shit right now. I do not want to eat salty candle wax on ham. I do not want to know its history. I want to erase it from my own head. People in St. Louis have other things that sound delightful—gooey butter cake, the phenomenal idea to bread and then deep-fry ravioli—but I wish not to invest a further second of my time on this sorry excuse for a sandwich, which sounds like an ersatz croque monsieur at best. I mean, it sounds fine. It sounds like the dull droning hum that everything sounds like lately. I should mention that of late I’ve felt like I’ve been being smashed by a huge grey hand, or living at a slight remove from everything, as if encased in a glass box that is not quite a sarcophagus; I’m still breathing but everything sounds like an echo. 

The days are getting shorter and every weekend it seems to rain and our domestic federal politics are a fascist clown-show whose pitiful attempt at spectacle is outstripped only by the incompetence on display, while everything outside the borders and in the states gets deadlier. This country is efficient at killing, and so catastrophically bad at everything else. I guess it is good at making processed cheese.

I’ve been imbibing pain and fear from the other side of the world and I am full up with it and have devolved into numbness, except the immediate terror for the people I love who are There Where The Bad Things Are Happening. I have gone through grief and self-distraction and mourning, and I will probably reemerge into one or any of those at any given moment, there’s no guide to following a war from afar, except not to lapse into apathy or true madness.

Still, all these emotional states preclude me from really getting worked up about a ham sandwich half a country away, really opening the only heart that fuels my one wild and precious life to it. The thought of doing that is like chewing on a candle. I simply cannot make myself give a shit; I wouldn’t give a shit about this if you fired me out of a cannon. Incidentally, please fire me out of a cannon. Crush me. Giles Corey makes more and more sense to me these days for what he said: More weight. As the martyrs of yore might have said if positioned in St. Louis: put me on the pizza rack and cover me in molten Provel—more cheese—and let me roast for your amusement. 

The Gerber at Roma’s

Still, I just wrote a thousand words about not giving a shit about a sandwich: that is impressive prolixity. My brain is still rabbiting away somewhere under its glass encasement. I have not given up on the list of sandwiches. I have not given up on myself, or on you. A lapse is not a vanishing, a pause is not an ending, and this sorry, sour excuse for an essay would probably be better with some smoked paprika on top. My apologies for myself and for the world in which I am situated. I am putting on my helmet and my smoked-glass goggles and getting in a half-burnt car and riding an endless stream of glassy melted processed cheese right out of here, off the page, straight to hell.