The Day After a Holiday Sandwich

Keep the party going

The Melt is a newsletter by, about and largely to entertain Jason Diamond. Hopefully you also like it and will consider subscribing and sharing this post.

If anybody can remember a time before 2020. you might recall that on Thursday, November 28, 2013, Thanksgiving and one of the nights of Hanukkah fell on the same day. The instance turned everybody into a Seth Cohen and the day was dubbed “Thanksgivukkah.” And while I thought it was nice and cute and all that, I was more interested in the day after. That was the day when I would achieve sandwich singularity and make a Thanksgiving leftover sandwich between two latkes. A once in a generation sandwich because, frankly, no heart should have to experience that twice.

The sandwich was obviously incredible: roasted turkey with a little gravy drizzled on, some stuffing, a light schmear of cranberry sauce on one latke and a light schmear of chopped liver on the other. Who could do that but once? I was fine.

But it got me thinking about a sort of sandwich philosophy. A way of keeping the party going the day after a big holiday where there’s a lot of eating. The leftover sandwich is an option, but I’m thinking it could be looser than that. I’m thinking it is basically an anything goes sandwich. I’m thinking you look to the Reuben as your inspiration and you go from there.

Today, everybody knows the Reuben. It’s one of those American staples. Corned beef (though I have had pastrami, which is also nice), melted Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, and always—always—grille between two slices of rye bread. You don’t have to make a Reuben; what I’m saying is you have to think like the inventors of the sandwich thought. But before I go into that, I should mention that, no, I didn’t make a mistake using the plural when mentioning the persons that created the sandwich. The Reuben has one of those histories like the ice cream sundae where you get multiple people or places laying claim to being the original. And while there are two different stories and two different cities involved in the Reuben dispute, there are two similarities: somebody slapped whatever on a sandwich, and that somebody, both times, was named…go on, guess his name.

That incredible menu cover above, courtesy of the Douglas County Historical Society, Omaha, Nebraska, is from the Golden Spur in Omaha. You are probably wondering how a sandwich so connected to Jewish delis could have come from a place like Nebraska. That is not in any way a slight on the Cornhusker State, it just doesn’t seem like the sort of place that you think of when you think ethnic. That said, I actually know a few Jews from there, and I hope they don’t find offense to this, and I hope they don’t take offense to me thinking that maybe Omaha isn’t the birthplace of the Reuben. But, for sake of argument, I will relay that the story of its Nebraska origin is pretty great. It involves a guy named Reuben Kulakofsky playing an all-night poker game at the Blackstone Hotel, and a chef named Bernard Schimmel made him a midnight snack. A sandwich on dark rye bread with sauerkraut, Thousand Island dressing, grilled corned beef and, the pièce de résistance that makes the Reuben what I like to call “The official sandwich of assimilation” because of how un-kosher it is, Swiss cheese. The sandwich was so popular among the guys that Kulakofsky put it on the menu of the hotel restaurant. It caught on, and eventually became a local favorite, ending up on the Golden Spur menu around the 1940s or so.

That’s a great story, and I can 1000 percent believe a guy named Reuben said something like “Hey, kid. Make me a sandwich that’s gonna give me some heartburn and mazel tovs at the end of the night,” and you get the Nebraska Reuben. But I also believe Arnold Reuben, owner of the famous Reuben’s in New York City, that he probably did it first. The main reason is you can just go to the Library of Congress website and look up his 1938 interview with the Federal Writers' Project where he discussed the origin story of his Reuben.

I owned a delicatessan on Broadway and one day a dame walks in, one of the theatrical dames, and she's down and out I suppose, and she asks me for something to eat. Her name was Anna Selos. Well, I'm feeling sort of good, so I figure I'll clown around for the dame. That's how it all came about. I'm clowning for the dame. Well, what do I do? I take a holy bread that I used to keep and grab up the knife and, you know, clowning like, I cut it right through on the bias. Then I take some roast beef, I don't remember exactly what. But, anyway, I figure I'll put anything on. So I take some meat and cheese and I slap it on, and I put on some spice and stuff and I make her up a sandwich; it was a foot high. Well the dame just eats it, that's all. She must have been plenty hungry. And when she gets through she says, “Mr. Reuben, that's the best sandwich I ever tasted in my life.” Well, the idea comes to me in a flash. I'll call it the Anna Selos sandwich, after the dame.

I should mention that the, eh, dame, in question, has been linked in the past to Charlie Chaplin, but nobody can figure out exactly how. Chaplin did tour North American with a vaudeville act, but was more connected to California and not NYC. It also doesn’t help that finding anything about Anna Selos does that internet thing where it just loops back to her connection to the sandwich and nothing else about her. All that, and Arnold Reuben doesn’t say when she asked for the sandwich. So that makes things a little difficult, but one thing he does mention in his W.P.A. interview is that not long after he made his Anna Selos sandwich, Marjorie Rambeau, one of those actresses that was versatile enough to make the transition from silent films to talkies, came in and asked for a sandwich, any sandwich. How did Arnold Reuben do it? “Well, I just slap it together. Whatever came into my mind. But I used good stuff.”

Now here’s where I’m going to start doing some guessing. Reuben had been operating his deli in some form or another since 1908. He moved onto Broadway in 1916, and moved a few more times around Midtown until Reuben sold the place in the 1960s and it went to 38th Street and Madison Avenue. The point is that Reuben operated within pretty close proximity to Broadway, meaning a lot of hungry stars probably walked through his doors. Rambeau made her Broadway debut in 1913 and worked on stages on and off until she went out to California to start making movies in 1917. So my best guess is sometime around then, Reuben was making these sandwiches for these women and naming them after them. And to make matters more confusing, in his 1953 memoir, Broadway Heartbeat, Bernard Sobel, who did publicity for the likes of Florenz Ziegfeld, claims that the original Reuben was made for Rambeau. Whatever the case, Arnold Reuben’s Reuben sandwich, at least on his 1946 menu, is there as the number one option. It’s got the cheese and dressing, but the meat is…ham and turkey. Not corned beef. If you wanted a sandwich with corned beef, melted Swiss and sauerkraut, you had to scan all the way down, past the sandwiches named after Fran Sinatra and Zsa Zsa Gabor and the Milton Berle which, disappointingly, is not just a massive sausage. Instead, it’s…turkey, jelly and cream cheese? You get to the bottom, and there it is: Reuben’s Pioneer. Swiss, kraut and corned beef. I guess you ordered the dressing yourself? Asked for it on the side? I don’t know. All of this is to say that I am of the belief that the original “Reuben” as we know it originated at Reuben’s, but it wasn’t the Reuben as we know it. I think people just started calling a Reuben sandwich the sort of sandwich that Arnold Reuben would make for you if you asked and you sort of took whatever he made you and that was it. It’s like how there are multiple search engines, but we call them all Google. We “Google” everything, just like how I have to believe that drunk Broadway stars we’re like “I could really go for one of those Reuben sandwiches right now,” and it just sort of stuck. That, to me, makes the most sense.

Now why, you might ask, did I just ramble on so much to get to that point? Why did I start talking about the Hanukkah and Thanksgiving sandwich of 2013 and then jump back in time like that? It’s really so I can get to the bigger idea, the one that also comes from Reuben Leonard and his W.P.A. interview from 1938. He keeps talking about his sandwiches and his creative process. And at the end, he actor and director Nikita Balieff came in one day. Baileff was the Russian-born mind behind a traveling show called La Chauve-Souris. Balieff went to Reuben one day and said he wanted a sandwich. He supposedly knew Reuben made sandwiches for famous people, and he wanted one of his own:

I say sure, and in a flash I made him a sandwich. I went into the kitchen and I grabbed some whole wheat bread, slapped some tongue on it, some bar-le-due, sweep pickle and cream cheese and called it Chauve Souris. No, boys, I don't know exactly how I create sandwiches. It just comes to me in a flash.

If you want, you can go ahead and ignore the tongue thing because I realize some of you probably didn’t grow up with family that spoke Yiddish as a first language, and the idea of tongue might be disgusting. What I’m more interested in is the idea. The sandwich ingredients just came to him in a flash. That was the grand philosophy of Reuben’s sandwich that, I believe, because The Reuben. Just whatever looked good. Maybe it wasn’t good, but who is going to argue besides maybe Larry David who parodied the celebrity sandwich thing on that episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where he complained about the Larry David sandwich having whitefish and sable. Why he’d complain about such an incredible combo, I have no idea, but whatever.

All of this is to say, here we all are on December 26th. Maybe we had a big Christmas dinner or maybe we ate a bunch of Chinese food. The point is that today is the day to make your own Reuben and call it whatever the hell you want. A Jimmy or Bob or Raekwon or a Jimmy Bob Raekwon. It can have whatever the heck you want on it, but I just think this is your chance to start building your own weird sandwich board. Go crazy with what you have or, if there’s a grocery store nearby, go get some ingredients. Make your dream sandwich. Enjoy it! Reuben would have wanted it that way.