You go to Subway to get a “grinder”

A meatball sub sounds sounds delicious right about now, to anyone living south of Conn. A meatball grinder doesn’t sound appetizing at all unless you’re making bolognese sauce for your spaghetti and need help mashing up the meatballs. However, a meatball ‘grinder’ is actually the same thing to New Englanders as a meatball ‘sub’ to Southerners, but why the discrepancy? Of course, people of different parts of the country have different names for sandwiches, such as hoagies heroes or po’ boys but if you don’t know what a grinder is when you’re in a New England sandwich shop, you’re going to have difficulty ordering lunch.

According to Yahoo! user jupyter_flew (who says they grew up in Conn.) on the Yahoo!Answers Web site, “the perfect grinder is made with a crusty bread. Meat is a soft salami, Provolone cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, onion, olive oil, salt, pepper, red pepper, and a little oregano. Absolutely NO mayonnaise. In parts of New England, especially Conn., this is referred to as a ‘regular grinder.’ Regular being the salami meat. The important part here is the bread – it can’t be that soft crap like from Subway.”

Another tid-bit I learned about the tasty sandwiches with strange names is that the name “grinder” originates from the Italian immigrants who sold these sandwiches to the boat dock workers. The workers were called “grinders” by the Italians. I wasn’t aware that the term had an Italian starting point, and although I find it annoying that New Englanders have to have their own term for a sandwich, I can’t deny that the crusty bread and hard salami that have supposedly famed these grinders are worth the historical name-change.