Marble City Stories Presents: The Zine Zone, Part 1: Steamed Ham

At this time of year, in this part of the country, entirely localized within our city?

We have entered the Zine Zone. First up, this wet sandwich.

Hey there, friends. I want to share a little story today, about one of those weird cultural things that seems so normal until you talk to someone from somewhere else and they look at you like you’ve got a few missing screws.

That’s right, we’re talking about Knoxville’s weirdest culinary innovation: steamed subs.

And if you’re not from around here, you might be thinking, “Wait, what’s weird about using steam to cook some meat for a sandwich, I’ve been to Firehouse,” and you’d be almost entirely off the mark. Because here in Knoxville, we make the sub, and then we steam it. Veggies and all. Totally different thing.

Now, I’ll admit something embarrassing: I thought, for nearly a decade, that steamed subs were a New York thing. It sounds right, doesn’t it? It seems like a concept that comes from a city larger than ours. But it’s actually just us -- which I found out after asking around for one in New York and being looked at like a wackadoo -- although there are other sandwiches in other places that are similar in concept, but not execution. We do some real heinous food crimes here, if my friends’ reactions are anything to go by.

So, what is a steamed sub, where does it come from, and why is Knoxville the only place you can find one? To break it down, a steamed sub is a submarine sandwich (or a grinder, or a hoagie, or a hero, or a po’boy – they’re everywhere, the only real connective tissue is long bread) that’s filled with meat, cheese, and toppings fresh from the cooler, and then the whole mess is shoved in a steam tray until the bread goes mush, the cheese melts and the veggies wilt. After that, it’s wrapped in foil, and you’ve got about five minutes to unwrap it and start eating before it completely disintegrates or turns into some unspeakable goo.

Strictly speaking, these are not good sandwiches. But like many of our culinary traditions from the Before Times, steamed subs were borne out of, if not necessity, then ingenuity and thrift. And like many culinary traditions cut from this cloth, they are reviled by people who didn’t grow up eating them. Like blood sausage or biscuits and gravy, looking at a sloppy, melty sandwich and thinking it looks appetizing is deeply cultural.

I’ve dug into their history a few times, here’s what we know: sub sandwiches didn’t really exist in Knoxville before the 1950s or so. We had sandwiches, sure, but bakeries around here didn’t specialize in the baguette-style loaves that you could find in cities with greater French and Italian populations. The Italian sandwich, of course, had been developed much earlier, and was commonplace in larger metropolitan areas.

Really, the start of the steamed sub starts not with the sub, but the steamed – Jack Neely used to provide a folk tale about these sandwiches, that the steamers were originally used for clothes and were sold off to sandwich shops when the traveling salesman couldn’t offload them at our laundries, but it doesn’t look like that’s the case anymore.

Today, we know that these sandwiches were invented, or “invented,” by Sam and Andy Captain, the Greek founders of late-night food on the Cumberland strip, using a Fresh-O-Matic steamer like the ones used by Firehouse Subs. The key innovation, the reason these took off, was in throwing the whole sandwich into the steamer and letting it sit. And that’s because Sam and Andy couldn’t afford good bread, and you couldn’t find a sub roll in town that didn’t come in a bag, shipped via truck from somewhere in the wide world beyond.

They were served up to drunk college students on the Cumberland Strip, often after midnight. From there, it makes sense that an entire generation of UT grads would develop a craving for these subs that might never go away – today, Gus’s Good Times Deli carries that torch, even though the original Sam and Andy’s is long gone, and students’ passion for this nostalgic sandwich follows them even after they leave campus behind.

Today, the bread is made here, the Fresh-O-Matics are rebuilt here, and there’s a cottage industry of steamed sub shops and the people who serve them. Steamed subs are our own, and unlike the Petro, which we need to talk about someday, they’ve never found success anywhere but here. Who knows how long they’ll last – the Nixon’s in Bearden recently had to lay off all their staff due to the pandemic. With a half-life measured in seconds, these sandwiches can’t survive the drive home, and you really shouldn’t buy them on Doordash. The whole industry could be going the same way.

Which is a shame. They really are something special.  

Author’s Notes

First, what is the Zine Zone? Like the Low-Cal Calzone Zone, this place is designed to be absurd. It’s where I’m going to be filing the things that aren’t strictly historical, or design-related — the stuff that’s just… weird. Steamed Subs are pretty weird, and also they’re not buildings, so this is where they live now.

It’s also an excuse for me to do bad graphic design. Anyway.

If you want to read more about steamed subs, there’s… a little more these days than there used to be. When I first started researching them a few years ago, this website was all there was to go on. Recently though, this appeared on The Bitter Southerner, and it is incredible. Wonderful writing. Excellent investigation. It’s the thing I try to do when I’m in my element and the world isn’t ending. Go read it.

Finally, and this is critically important, we will not discuss that thing Chicago does with the bialy. Heinous. But they’d probably say the same thing about us.