The regional table / Illinois
Springfield Horseshoe Sandwich
It is a knife-and-fork sandwich built on a hot platter, and the only difficult part is a cheese sauce that has to stay smooth from the stove to the table.
The horseshoe is younger than the public domain and the quantities below were worked out for this page, but Springfield has kept better paper on this dish than most cities keep on any of theirs — and the paper does not agree with itself. The Sangamon County Historical Society, writing at SangamonLink, says that although accounts differ, most people credit Joseph Schweska, chef at the Leland Hotel at Sixth Street and Capitol Avenue in the late 1920s, who needed a new lunch item and whose wife Elizabeth suggested a Welsh rarebit sauce. By family account the first one was made with ham cut off the bone in a horseshoe shape and served with potato wedges rather than fries, and the cheese sauce was Schweska's own. The Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau, on its own printed recipe sheet, credits the sandwich jointly to Joe Schweska and Steve Tomko at the Old Leland Hotel in 1928. Those are two named local authorities giving two different answers to the same question, and this page is not going to break the tie. What both agree on is Tomko's undisputed contribution: he worked at the Leland alongside Schweska and then carried the dish to Norb Andy's Tabarin and to Wayne's Red Coach Inn, which is how it left one hotel kitchen and became the food of a city.
The documentary record is sharper than either claim and it contains the best fact on this page. The Illinois State Journal reporter Robert Wood printed recipes from three Springfield hotel chefs on Christmas Day 1938, Schweska's rarebit sauce among them; the chef told him he made six gallons of it a day, that he had started making it around 1932, and that it was no secret because he had already given it away to hundreds of people. The proportions he gave were half a pound of butter, half a pound of flour, a quart of milk, a pint of beer, a pound of old English or American cheese, salt, an eighth of a teaspoon each of cayenne and dry mustard and a tablespoon of Lea and Perrins, cooked in a double boiler with the beer stirred in just before serving. And the word horseshoe does not appear in that article once. SangamonLink's search of the newspaper files puts the first horseshoe attached to rarebit sauce in an advertisement of 8 October 1946 for the Mill, where Schweska was then the chef — ham and eggs on toast with Welsh rarebit sauce and French fries — and the first printed horseshoe sandwich in another Mill advertisement of 21 October 1948. The dish is older than its name by twenty years, which is a thing almost no famous sandwich can say. The CVB sheet, incidentally, prints an entirely different sauce, thickened with egg yolks and beer rather than with a roux, and dates the newspaper recipe to 1939 rather than 1938. Take your pick; the version below follows Schweska's roux, loosened, because it is the one that will not curdle on you.
Why this version works
A roux, not egg yolks. The two published Springfield sauces take opposite routes. The egg-yolk version has to be kept piping hot without ever bubbling, stirred in one direction with a wooden spoon, and it scrambles the moment anybody looks away. A flour-thickened base is nearly unbreakable by comparison: the starch gets between the proteins and holds the emulsion even if the pan gets away from you for a second.
The fries go round the rim. Under the sauce they are wet in ninety seconds. Banked around the outside of a hot platter they stay crisp long enough to be eaten as fries, with as much sauce as each forkful chooses to collect. That is also where the name comes from: the ham is the shoe, the fries are the nails, and the sizzling platter is the anvil.
The beer goes in at the end. Schweska's own instruction was to add the beer just before serving, and the chemistry agrees with him. Beer is acidic, and acid added to hot milk protein early will curdle it; added at the end, off the boil, it thins the sauce to a pouring consistency and puts back the bitterness that all that cheese needs.
American cheese in the blend, and the federal rule says why. Title 21 of the Code of Federal Regulations, section 133.169, defines pasteurized process cheese and lists what may be used to emulsify it — sodium citrate, potassium citrate, and a row of sodium and potassium phosphates — up to 3 percent of the finished weight. Those salts are exactly what keeps melted cheese from separating into oil and rubber. Cheddar alone brings flavour and breaks; a third of the cheese as process American brings the emulsifying salts along with it and the sauce stays glossy.
