Horseshoe Sandwich

The horseshoe is traditionally said to have been created at the Leland Hotel in Springfield in the late 1920s — usually dated 1928 — by chef Joe Schweska, who took the idea from a Welsh rarebit recipe recalled by his wife Elizabeth. The 1928 date should be held loosely: local historical work finds no print use of 'horseshoe' before the mid-1940s and dates the sauce to around 1932. A rival authorship claim by a hotel dishwasher, Steve Tomko, surfaced only after Schweska's death and is generally treated as discredited; the middle view is that Schweska created the dish and Tomko later helped popularize it. The name is traditionally explained by a horseshoe-shaped cut of ham with the potatoes as the 'nails.'

A heavy, all-at-once plate: a raft of crisp, butter-edged toast at the bottom, a layer of meat, a tangled heap of hot fries, and a glossy pale-gold cheese blanket ladled over so it pools on the plate and slips between the fries. Crisp toast edges give way to molten, faintly mustard-sharp cheese richness. There is no eating it neatly — fork and knife, every layer in one bite.

Melted cheese alone tends to break, its overheated casein squeezing out fat and water; a rarebit-style sauce stays smooth instead, held together by dry mustard acting as a mucilage emulsifier, by the lecithin in egg yolk, by the acidity of beer and Worcestershire keeping the casein dispersed, and by a flour roux — the old-fashioned route to what a modern cheese sauce does with sodium citrate. Because the original predated Prohibition's 1933 repeal, the early sauce used non-alcoholic near beer in place of ale.