Nowadays, the Fresh-O-Matic is sold as a thing to “re-therm” food, commercial-kitchen shorthand that brings to mind a “Star Trek”-style futurism reflected in the early aesthetics of the appliance. I could find only a handful of photographs of older models. The first Fresh-O-Matic had rounded corners and a spunky atomic font; an update I imagine occurred in the ’70s produced steamers that look like station wagons, complete with wood paneling and Fresh-O-Matic spelled in elegant Oldsmobile cursive. The last update before a drastic modern redesign brought machines that look like squat little robots. There are still quite a few of these later models kicking around, but most are a little scuffed up and would look more at home alongside WALL-E than aboard the Starship Enterprise. Until recently, a pump handle controlled the steam action. In the last 15 years, a push-button replaced the handle. (I haven’t been able to date the makeover that included the switch to push-button. The best clue I’ve found is the cover of a user manual dated 2014 announcing, “This is not your father’s Fresh-O-Matic!” and heralding updates. However, the cover does not point out the button explicitly as an update; it only promises the steamer button will now prevent flooding of the hot plate.)

I ask Dennis if he has any insight on why we started steaming sandwiches so furiously in the greater East Tennessee area, and he doesn’t, really. He guesses it came from down around UT campus, but it doesn’t really matter now, does it? That’s just the way Parton’s always did it, and the way they still do. I ask him if he has any trouble getting uninitiated tourists to try a steamed hoagie, and he doesn’t, really. He can usually convince them to try it, and once they do, he says with a laugh and a bit of a growl, “they don’t go back to cold!” He asks if I want to see a knife he’s been using for 45 years; I do, and his blue eyes twinkle as he shows off a wood-handled blade worn down into the shape of an icicle. He asks if I want to see his original lettuce holder, and he pulls out one of those old Jadite-colored Tupperware crispers meant to hold a single head of iceberg. I’m struck by the familiar smallness of it, and how homelike this place feels.     Dennis Parton showing off a knife he’s used at the deli for 45 years.    As Dennis slices ham for my sandwich onto the old Simpson True-Weight scale his father used in the family grocery long before opening the deli, I ask him if he thinks anyone will take over when he’s ready to retire. He doesn’t, really. His nephew isn’t interested, and he never had employees or children. He intends to keep making sandwiches in this shop, just him and the Lord, until one of them decides Dennis is done making sandwiches. “My customers,” he says, “if they love and enjoy this place, they’ll pray for me, and we’ll make it to 50 years.” I take to a booth in the corner with my ham and swiss on dark with mayo. It’s a cold, gray day, and the glow of slow-moving taillights through the steamy windows makes the shop feel especially cozy.  There is something holy in the humility of this place, in the work, in being uncorrupted through forty-five seasons on and off, as the town swelled and morphed and began to close in on all sides. “I do the very best I can,” Dennis had said earlier. “Sometimes people have to wait. But, I do it as fast as I can, and I do it well.” He’d shrugged and laughed, then was quiet for a minute. “Well, you don’t get rich doing it. You just meet a lot of nice people.”    Parton’s deli    As I’m eating and thinking, a woman with a slight hitch in her get-along and a voice like a country-fried Fran Drescher comes in. She and Dennis greet each other like high school sweethearts, and she quickly thanks Jesus for Parton’s still being open at this hour of the afternoon. She tells Dennis that even though she lives an hour away in Strawberry Plains, he’s the only one she trusts not to over-steam her hoagie. She tells him about her new grandbaby then fascinatingly segues into a recollection about the first time she saw a calf being born — its wobbly legs and saucer-sized eyes, the wonder and purity and heart-stopping thrill of it all. She leaves with two turkey and hot pepper in a sack, and I’m left to try to reconcile this conversation with the steady stream of tourist cars rolling by on the Parkway a few feet from where I sit. I guess even in Gatlinburg, people just need a place to go. Somewhere to talk a little, to hand out blessings and to get something good to eat — maybe even some pound cake to take back to the house.

Within this complicated and not-quite-traceable history, I found the predictable twists and turns you’d find in any business sector historically driven by small, family-owned operations. Families fuss and fracture along ideological lines, parents want to retire, and kids aren’t always interested in taking over. Rent goes up. Entire neighborhoods transform. Buildings crumble or flood or catch on fire. Sometimes folks relocate, sometimes they rebuild, sometimes they just lock up and go home. Sam Captain spent his sunset years breeding bird dogs; Andy Captain died in Greece.As best I can tell, Parton’s Deli, established in 1974, is the oldest continuously operating, family-owned deli in the greater Knoxville area, which extends eastward through Sevierville to the North Carolina border. There may well be others; sandwich shops of this generation rarely have a strong internet presence, and I haven’t yet visited all 127 delicatessens listed in the Yellow Pages.

Before I even realized that a folklore nugget of this caliber should be regarded with some suspicion, Neely let me down gently: “Unfortunately, that turned out not to be true.” However, he handed off a vague memory of having read something about the origin in a 1990s newspaper column, and that was enough to get me as close to the truth as I’ll ever get. The on-campus Sam & Andy’s closed in April 1997. A few months later, News Sentinel columnist and reported hoagie enthusiast Shannon Stanfield ran an interview with their aforementioned nephew, Bill. Bill Captain had come over from Greece at age 16, and went from washing dishes at Sam & Andy’s to piloting the Hoagie Wagon to running his own deli, Vic & Bill’s, with yet another Captain cousin. Bill would have been 62 at the time of the interview, reflecting on almost five decades of making the sandwiches that would come to define his adopted city. Stanfield reported:

I asked Neely, hoping that as the doyen of Knoxville pop-history he would have some information long forgotten by other Vols of his generation. “I had this romantic idea,” he said, “like something from a Ken Burns story. … I knew that before ever opening a restaurant, the Captains were hatmakers; therefore, they would have had steamers around the shop. I imagined that one day they just said, Hey! Let’s try these steamers on some sandwiches!”

According to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, the term “hoagie” first appeared (sort of) in Philadelphia in 1936: “After witnessing a friend devour a large sandwich and thinking he was a hog to eat it all at once,” sandwich shop proprietor Al De Palma introduced a pile of cold cuts on a long Italian roll and called it a “hoggie.” Soon, “competitors in the Philadelphia area copied his sandwich and sold it under various names, including hoogie, hogie, and horgy. By 1950 … the sandwich became commonly known as the hoagie.” The Companion maintains this was the first instance of the “submarine” style of sandwich, which spread quickly throughout the Northeast and then the greater U.S., taking on many names. The Companion never mentions the term “hoagie” being used outside of Philadelphia and New Jersey; its only further specification is that the sandwich be made to order.     Hoagie from the sunrise deli    The first occurrence of the word “hoagie” in the Knoxville News Sentinel appears in 1961, in a help-wanted ad that would never fly today: “Waitress — Preferably unexperienced, age 19 to 22. Work near college campus in Knoxville’s new and original HOAGIE HOUSE — Cumberland and Eighteenth.” As best I can tell, the Hoagie House never opened. This does not render the listing insignificant; in 1961, Greek immigrants Sam and Andy Captain (née Kapitanopolous) were already operating a diner called The Tennessean at that same intersection on the University of Tennessee Campus. And they had been since 1946.Nine years into The Tennessean’s existence, in 1955, the first super-heated food steamer hit the American market: the Wear-Ever Fresh-O-Matic. After exhaustive research, I’m still unsure how the Fresh-O-Matic was first marketed, but the record clearly suggests it was always sold as a commercial product. (And the 1955 date satisfies my own nagging curiosity as to why no hoagie-sellers are included in the abundant Knoxville café references in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree. The novel is set in 1951.) To Neely’s earlier point, nobody thought  to write an article for the News Sentinel celebrating the Fresh-O-Matic first hitting the foothills, so the dates of the earliest sales here remain a mystery. However, the first appearance of a used model for sale in the News Sentinel classifieds appears in April of 1963, in an ad for an auction closing out the old Star Drive-In in Sevierville. It is listed at $229.50, about $1,935.38 in today’s dollars.

In earlier decades, Neely said, people didn’t think low-culture facets of everyday life like mountain music, utilitarian clothing, or corner-store foods were significant enough to write about. As a result, there’s often very little published on local restaurant trends in older newspapers and books. It’s easy enough to find out when proprietors applied for liquor licenses or needed to hire extra hands, but it’s rare to find pre-internet photos of menus or restaurant interiors. Keeping that in mind, I thought it best to start my investigation broadly.

It took several years of moving around after college to grasp it: There were no steamed sandwiches to be found in the Carolina Lowcountry, or on the West Coast, or even in Nashville. By the time I moved back to North Carolina in 2019, I had gone from hoagie-curious to hoagie-obsessed. I wanted to know exactly when and why we started steaming hoagies in Knoxville, but no one I spoke with knew. If I wanted the truth, I would have to dig it up myself.

In Knoxville, we understand hot deli sandwiches are called hoagies; we understand they should be soft and squishy; we understand (at least implicitly) they should be made that way by a joyride in a Fresh-O-Matic steamer, which is about the size of a big microwave and retails for $1,370.     Photo via Natick Soldier Systems Center Photographic Collection, 1976     In 2009, The New York Times offered readers a chance to fire questions about regional foods to foodways historian John T. Edge, executive director of the University of Mississippi’s Southern Foodways Alliance. Of the 25 questions posed in the comments, two asked for an elucidation of the Knoxville tradition of steaming sandwiches. Edge dismissed the question by telling us, “Steamers are embraced elsewhere,” then got back to a narrative concerning the nuanced terroir of barbecue sauce.Steaming appliances may be embraced elsewhere, but I’m certain it is only in Knoxville that you could lift the lid of one and expect to find a hoagie there. While I am aware of the great power of the collective American consciousness to ruin anything regional and peculiar — last year, thousands of people lost their minds on Twitter when they found out that St. Louisans prefer to slice a bagel like a Texan slices a brisket — I am here nonetheless to stand tall and tell you: This is special. There are half a million hillbillies in East Tennessee who have been steaming each and every one of their hoagies for over 50 years.

With high school and a driver’s license came the wild opportunity to make lunch an act of rebellion. I would grit my golden-child teeth and stroll confidently out into the parking lot at 12:20, as if I were a person who regularly did bold, adult things, like leave campus without permission. My best friend Cassie was usually along for this thrill, and we would bolt to the nearby gas station advertising Cold Beer * Tobacco * Market * Deli. Our high school sat just off a nearly empty seven-mile stretch of state highway between two larger and more important roads. The Bi-Lo was the only place near enough to grab a sausage biscuit on your way to first period. Its parking lots, where we held car-wash fundraisers or arranged off-campus fights after school, was the first place we ate on our own. Back in the school’s parking lot, we’d peel the foil off our sandwiches, gossiping and giggling, washing that stolen half-hour down with weightless frozen Mountain Dew swirled into giant foam cups. Imagine it in Kodachrome: two teenage girls enjoying gas station food without the intrusion of irony or Instagram. Week in and week out, our orders were an early exercise in the comfort of sameness. Always hoagies. Always steamed. All Knoxvillians know about steamed sandwiches. In fact, all Knoxvillians know steamed sandwiches so very deeply in their consciousness that they rarely consider their standard hot-ham-and-cheese has, in fact, been steam-heated. It’s so widespread — such a default — that most people seem puzzled if you poke around to find out why we do it this way. You get a lot of shrugs, a lot of “Well. I never really thought about it.”

We lived in South Knoxville, in a mid-century subdivision full of bad drivers — a dicey mix of old people and teenagers. I was always careful to stay off the shoulderless road, keeping my little sister corralled on the safe side as we tramped along on so many sticky Tennessee summer evenings, our light-up sneakers collecting cut grass. About a quarter-mile down the hill from our house sat a low cinderblock building shaped like a brick, its white paint speckled with adornments in always-fresh Volunteer orange. It was the first place we were allowed to go by ourselves. The Korner Market & Deli was not a quaint country store. It was a purpose-serving place, anchoring the neighborhood in a way that was becoming dated even in the early 1990s. I learned the word “loitering” as soon as I could read, sounding out the hand-lettered rules on the side of the building while my mom ran in to grab an emergency bag of hotdog buns, or Cokes and Winstons for my visiting grandparents. Inside, Faye cashed checks, ran the grill, and recognized our phone number when it popped up on her caller ID. Underneath a halo of cigarette smoke, she gave hell to whoever else was posted up at the counter. Faye would nod toward us as the door clanged and holler out, “Hey girls. How’s your momma ’n’ ’em?”“Momma says hi,” we’d say, barely looking up on our way to the candy aisle. We’d hand over a ten at the counter and head back up the hill with a heavy plastic bag smelling like fries, Styrofoam boxes squeaking with each step, a secret slab of Laffy Taffy tucked into the back pocket of my sister’s cutoffs. Occasionally my mom or aunt would spring for a burger — occasionally my mom’s friends made the trip out to our house just for that burger — but my sister and I never deviated: There was always a hoagie in that bag. Always ham and Swiss, on dark bread, mayo only. Always steamed.