I watched part of The Harvey Girls (1946) on TCM today. At the beginning of the movie, one of the girls on the train offers Judy Garland an “award-winning” Chillicothe Sandwich for lunch, claiming it’s based on a recipe of her aunt’s.
I would logically assume that this was something well-known at the time, and that it found its way into the Harvey’s menu,* but I cannot find any recipe for it anywhere (or any mention of it beyond the movie).
Has anyone ever actually eaten a Chillicothe Sandwich? Judy said that hers tasted like chicken.
*I remember eating at Harvey’s with my dad back in the '60s, when they ran the restaurants at the oases on the Illinois Interstate.
There appear to be towns named Chillicothe in Ohio, Texas, Missouri and Illinois. I have lived in the one in Ohio for 13 years and have never heard of a Chillicothe sandwich. If one were to be invented today, it would almost certainly involve a huge slab of deep-fried pork loin.
Susan was from Ohio, but I don’t believe she was from Chillicothe. The character Alma was from that town, and she provided the sandwich. The movie was definitely referring to food.
Never seen this movie, but was the sammich provided by a railroad employee? It’s entirely possible that the RR had its own menu of random stuff with names of towns along the line.
It’s just a story that one of the girls made up so she could give Judy Garland’s character a sandwich, because they could see that she didn’t have anything to eat.
“Here’s my aunt’s award-winning Chillicothe sandwich, Mabel, would you like to try it?”
“Not me, I’m full”
“How about you, miss?”
“Oh, thank you. (Bites into sandwich) Mm, tastes just like chicken.”
(And I wonder if that was the start of that joke, although it’s a throwaway line in the movie.)
Roddy
The name Chillicothe is of Shawnee origin. It comes from the name of one of the five Shawnee tribal divisions: the Chalakatha. The basic name is Chalaka, and the suffix -tha means ‘person’ in Shawnee. Historically, there have been seven sites in Ohio that have gone by that name, because wherever the tribe moved, the name moved with them. The present Chillicothe is just the most recent town they lived in before the Indians got kicked out of Ohio. Another Ohio town, Piqua, is named after another of the Shawnee tribal divisions, the Pekowi. As for the eponymous sandwich, I got nothin.
