Chicago Italian beef Period BOrigin theory CVerified

When and where it took shape

Chicago Italian beef is a working-class and immigrant staple of the city: cheap beef chuck roasted, sliced paper-thin, and dipped in its own juices (au jus). It took shape in Chicago from the early twentieth century into the Depression years, roughly between 1900 and 1940.

For the dish to exist, cheap beef first had to reach the city's people as a matter of course. From the 1880s, refrigerated railcars carried meat out of Chicago across the country, and cheap beef became an everyday thing. Even a tough, cheap cut of chuck, roasted slowly and sliced thin, then dipped in its juices, turns tender and filling. Street stands and lunch counters served it cheaply and fed Chicago's workers and immigrants.

Chicago Italian beef comes with a well-worn origin story. Italian immigrants working the stockyards, the telling goes, took cheap tough chuck, roasted it slowly, sliced it paper-thin and dipped it in its juices to feed a crowd, and the thin-slicing trick was born at a frugal wedding where meat had to be stretched. Some shops name an inventor; another account credits a different figure in the 1920s, Pasquale Scala, founder of the Scala Packing Company. Each version is specific and thoroughly plausible.

But when you look for the contemporary record behind these anecdotes, it slips through your fingers. Nick Kindelsperger, a former food writer at the Chicago Tribune, went through the paper's back pages and wrote in 2024 that the first clear mention of Italian beef he was able to find came on June 28, 1953: a short notice that the women's and men's clubs of Villa Scalabrini, a home for the elderly in Northlake, would serve Italian beef and sausage sandwiches at their picnic. On May 26, 1962, a piece by Mary Meade carried what may be the first recipe, and with it the first instruction to dip the bread in the juices. The dish is said to have been made in the 1920s and 1930s, yet in this one newspaper nothing naming an inventor or a year of invention has turned up before 1953. As for the Scala Packing Company, a 2012 CBS Chicago article says it opened on West Harrison Street in 1925, and that during the Depression it came up with this way of serving beef and served it at weddings and banquets. The article gives no source for the date or the story.

Several shops and figures lay claim to the dish, and none of those claims has yet been confirmed by a record from the period. Nor does its absence from a single newspaper make the legends false. The dating to the 1920s and 1930s rests on the shops' own lore and on the Chicago Food Encyclopedia, which Kindelsperger cites. The encyclopedia places the origin not in any shop but in Italian home cooking, and says the dish, cheap and able to feed a crowd, was served at the so-called peanut weddings of the 1920s, the frugal receptions of the day.

The legends that name an inventor are still told today, alongside the shop signs that carry them. Nothing in the Tribune's back pages, at least, has turned up to confirm them; the reporter searched that one paper, and other newspapers and records of the time lie outside his article. What can be said is that a thin-sliced beef sandwich appeared on Chicago's street corners, and that by 1953 it was on the menu at a picnic held by a Northlake home for the elderly. Who made it first, the surviving records have not yet told us.