Spuckies

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

Maybe I'll do some work on "spuckies" today. It's a food term from the Boston
area.

What does DARE have? My latest volume seems to end at "Sk." They gotta finish
that thing.


http://rollerboogie.livejournal.com/187688.html
Wed, Aug. 28th, 2002, 03:36 pm
A spuccadella, or spucky, is an archaic term, used primarily in the
blue-collar Italian enclaves of Boston, for a submarine sandwich roll. Only a few
people in Boston actually know what it means, oddly enough; one of the deli guys at
the grocery store where I work is something like a fourth-generation Italian
(from Reveah, no less, which means his credibility is ironclad), and he
frequently asks confused customers, many of whom, at lunchtime, are tourists with
little command of Boston slang, whether they want their sandwich on a spucky or
a "bulkie", which is another archaic term for a Kaiser roll.

Very often this exchange will be followed by a long, momentous pause, and the
customer will stammer something to the effect of, "I have no idea what either
of those are." It's pretty awesome.


http://www.boston-online.com/spuckie.html>
> The final word on spuckies

>From "The Answer Guys," Middlesex News, 10/31/93. The conversation turned, as
it so often does in the newsroom, to food. There was Jim eating a sandwich
he'd just bought from Sub-Way. Jim, a native Pennsylvanian, casually dropped
that where he came from, what he was eating was a hoagie. Other reporters jumped
in, in the sort of conversation everybody has surely had at one time or
another: how many different names are there for this kind of sandwich? And we
quickly exhausted all the possibilities: grinder, sub, hero and, of course, hoagie.
Or so we thought. We were about to turn back to our terminals, when Vanessa,
who had been sitting unusually quietly at her desk, exploded: ``Spucky!'' Was
something stuck in her throat? Was it time for her to switch back to decaf?
Amid the cries of ``What?!?'' she explained: Back in the old neighborhood,
Mission Hill in Boston, an elongated roll stuffed with meat and stuff was known by
people of a certain age not as a sub but as a ``spucky.'' Most of us sort of
just accepted this new bit of information, filing it away with the other mental
flotsam reporters constantly collect. But one editor, who shall remain
nameless so she doesn't mess around with this column, expressed a certain, shall we
say, disbelief. This was one factoid she just could not digest. Vanessa refused
to budge. But there it stood. Was this really true? Didn't we have better
things to do than to call up folks in the old neighborhood? A couple of days
later, in one of those miraculous coincidences that makes you believe in a higher
authority, Vanessa reported that, while driving through Milford after an
assignment, she spotted a sub shop named ``Spuckys.'' We couldn't resist. Even
though *we* believed her (after getting confirmation from a checkout lady at the
Roche Bros. in West Roxbury), we called Spuckys up. Yep, owner Steve Donofrio
confirmed, a spucky is indeed what they called a sub in the old Italian wards
of Boston. A native of Roxbury himself, he said they were the stuff of
childhood. ``A lot of people were brought up that way you know, I remember back when
my aunt used to say `spucky,' '' he said. But it's far from a dying term, he
said. Go anywhere in the North End and ask for a ``sausage and pepper roll on a
spucky'' or even just ``a sausage on a spucky'' and they'll whip one up for
you quick as a flash, he said. There's even a Spukies 'N Pizza Shop in
Dorchester, he said, expressing what surely could not be disdain for the way they spell
it. Donofrio said people whizzing through Milford are always stopping in
front of his store the name alone brings back memories, he says. Then they come in
and order one up. Donofrio said he's heard several possible origins for the
word. One is that it comes from ``spuccadella,'' which is a particular kind of
Italian roll. Spucky rolls, he said, tend to be more pointy at the ends than
normal sub roles and are split on the top. On a roll ourselves, we dialed up
Bova's, the 24-hour bakery on Prince Street in the North End. Owner Joey Bova
says he doesn't hear the term as much as his father might have. But he said the
bakery's order forms still list ``spucky'' as an option. Copyright 1993,
Middlesex News, Framingham, Mass. All rights reserved.