Po-boy Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The po-boy is a sandwich that took shape in New Orleans, Louisiana. Fried oysters, roast beef, or shrimp are crammed into a long loaf of French bread. The city's French bread has a thin, light crust and a soft, airy crumb, so it can carry a generous filling without turning heavy.

The sandwich as we know it comes clearly into view in 1929. Bennie and Clovis Martin, who ran a stand at the French Market, wanted to cut several sandwiches from a single loaf and hand them out cheaply and in quantity. They asked a baker, John Gendusa, to make them a forty-inch roll of even thickness from end to end. Once Gendusa baked this dedicated loaf, the Martins could slice one long roll into a run of sandwiches filled with roast beef and other cheap cuts of meat. The long sandwich in its present form dates to 1929, the year Gendusa baked his special bread.

The name itself first surfaces in print in November of that same year, according to the local reporter James Karst. An article in the New Orleans States on a trial in Plaquemines Parish describes the crowd eating huge sandwiches made from whole loaves of French bread split lengthwise and filled with ham, sausage or cheese.

The setting was a lunch stand at the French Market. In a corner of the market crowded with working people, the sandwich was served as a cheap way to fill the stomach, and in time it became one of the dishes that define New Orleans.

The best-known account of how the po-boy got its name belongs to the summer of 1929. That July, the streetcar operators of New Orleans went on strike. The Martin brothers, Bennie and Clovis, had themselves once worked as conductors, and from their French Market stand they fed the striking men free of charge. Each striker who came in, the story goes, was greeted as "another poor boy" walking through the door. A letter from the brothers survives showing that they backed the strike, and the tale is told in Louisiana's state humanities encyclopedia.

Look closely at that origin for the name, though, and the ground shifts. The strike-support letter itself says only that "Our meal is free to any members of Division 194"; it mentions neither the contents of the sandwich nor the name "poor boy." According to the reporter James Karst, the story that the Martins coined the name first appeared in a New Orleans newspaper in 1969, forty years after the strike. Before that, in 1933, a local paper had written that the name came from the hard-pressed truck farmers of St. Bernard, who gathered every day along the curb of North Peters Street with their produce.

There are also hints that the name was around before the strike. The jazz musician Sidney Bechet, in his 1960 autobiography, tells of the day he hired Louis Armstrong for a job advertising a movie theater. With the money they bought beer and "those sandwiches, Poor Boys, they're called — a half a loaf of bread split open and stuffed with ham." The paragraph gives no year; a separate story a little further down the same page is dated "around 1913." And "they're called" is in the present tense, so the wording does not rule out a memoir of the 1950s putting a later name on an earlier sandwich. Bechet moved north in 1917, and one reporter argues that the Martins reached the city only after that, which would make Bechet's account independent of them; but two local reference sites have the brothers working as streetcar conductors in the city by the mid-1910s, so the sources disagree on when the brothers arrived. If Bechet's memory does preserve the name as it was used at the time, then the 1929 strike and the Martin brothers were not the origin of the name but the moment it spread and stuck. The evidence to settle that is not yet in hand.

A separate tale traces the name to the French "pour bourre" ("for a tip") and to nuns who gave bread to beggars in the late nineteenth century. But no evidence that anyone ordered such a sandwich in that era has turned up in the newspapers or menus of the period. Lacking any record to stand on, this explanation has been set aside.

The flowery etymology has lost its footing, and even the Martin brothers' strike-summer story is less certain as the source of the name than it once seemed. Nor can Bechet's memory by itself fix how old the name is. The po-boy as we know it, a long special loaf packed with fillings, dates to 1929.