French dip sandwich Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The French dip sandwich is thinly sliced roast beef in a French roll, served dipped in the jus that ran off the meat. It is placed in the early twentieth century, in the Los Angeles of the 1900s and 1910s. Beef and wheat bread were both ordinary things to buy in that city. Roast a large joint, let the juices collect in the bottom of the pan, dip the bread in them: a sandwich that simple suited the delicatessens on street corners crowded with working people.

The moment the dipping started can be read in the words of the man involved. Philippe Mathieu, who founded Philippe the Original, was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times in 1951 and described it this way. The house specialty then was a "man-sized" sandwich of roast pork; one day a customer noticed the gravy left in the bottom of the roasting pan and asked to have one side of his French roll dipped in it. The thing caught on, and by the next day Mathieu had a gallon of gravy ready.

The word "French" in the name often leads people to assume the dish came from France. The leading account has it referring not to the food's nationality but to Mathieu, who was of French descent, and to the character of his shop, a French delicatessen; the French loaf presumably fed into the name as well. How the name arose and how the dish began are two separate stories, and they are better kept apart.

Two well-made origin tales attach to the French dip, and both turn on an accident.

The first belongs to Philippe the Original. Its founder, Philippe Mathieu, was making a sandwich for a police officer (a fireman, in some tellings) when he let the roll drop into the pan of jus. The second belongs to Cole's, opened in the same year of 1908, whose cook Jack Garlinghouse is said to have softened a French roll in the jus for a customer with sore gums.

But one of these principals left an account in his own words. The fact-checking site Snopes, examining the origin stories, quotes Mathieu directly from the Los Angeles Times of 27 August 1951, in a piece headed "Philippe's Founder Recalls Busy Days." There is no dropped roll in it. There is no complaint about stale bread. The house specialty at the time was pork, not beef, and the dipping, by Mathieu's own account, was not a mishap at all: a customer saw the gravy in the pan and asked for it. The contemporary testimony of the man credited with the invention does not fit the accident.

The tale has another curious property. In 1997 an owner on the Cole's side gave a version in which the bread fell into the jus and the customer behind asked for the same thing, which is nearly the shape of the Philippe story. A lucky accident that turns into a hit has been travelling between the two shops. Neither house is telling a memory that belongs only to it.

It is worth separating the questions here. The accident can be set aside. Which shop first put the sandwich on the counter, however, is still unsettled. Mathieu's 1951 account does not deny his part in the dish; if anything it supports it. The year is given variously between 1908 and 1918, with the shop itself claiming 1918. Cole's has the weaker hand, since a century of newspapers has been said to carry no mention linking Cole's to the French dip, but that does not put its claim out of the running.

Losing the accident does not settle where the sandwich came from. What it removes is the scene the two shops told separately and told alike.