Quote:
Originally posted by sycamore
No mayo. Adding that to the dressing would have been overkill, IMO.
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I was just enumerating and (tongue-in-cheek) bemoaning the unorthodox ingredients in a sandwich you persist in calling a "cheesesteak". :-)
I'm enough of a purist to consider mayo to be heresy. I guess once we start calling a sandwich with *chicken* in it a "chicken cheesesteak" all is lost anyway. How about a "salmon cheese steak"? After all, there *are* salmon steaks. I don't think I've ever seen chicken steaks.
This may go far in suggesting that the defining characteristics of a cheesesteak may be:
1) melted cheese (hopefully not bleu cheese), and
2) the *bread*, which must be a small Italian loaf supplied by a Mafia-owned business and
3) No vegetables besides onions (and in reform congregations, peppers)
This points up the futility of getting a cheesesteak outside of Philly, or for that matter, getting a real hoagie, since they are properly built on the same rolls, apparently only available in Philly and environs. Given the proposed definition above, a hoagie misses being a cheesteak only by virtue of having unmelted cheese, and various vegetable violations. Thus, a grinder is an even nearer miss, because it's cheese *is* melted...and a cheesesteak hoagie is still in vegetable trouble, which is why the adjective is "cheesesteak" and the noun "hoagie"; it cannont be a "hoagie cheesesteak", but rather a hoagie *containing * a cheesesteak.
But it's not a real cheesesteak. Cheesesteaks *are* a real religion, though. :-)