Andrew Huse, a historian whose voracious appetite for telling stories about food as an essential ingredient in culture led him on a quest to unravel the disputed origins of the Cuban sandwich, died on Aug. 20 at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 52.
His mother, Carol Elwood, said he took his own life.
As an archivist and librarian at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Mr. Huse scoured the institution’s holdings of historical materials about the state in search of menus, recipes and other culinary artifacts that revealed the region’s history and culture.
“I have always seen the library not simply as a passive repository for published material, but as an active, dynamic generator of unique content,” he said in a university blog post in 2020.
After publishing a book on the history of the Columbia Restaurant — Florida’s oldest continuously operating eatery — and another on Tampa’s saloons and steakhouses, Mr. Huse turned to a spirited dispute over the birthplace of the Cuban sandwich.
In one corner: Miami, with the country’s largest population of Cuban immigrants, who made their sandwich with ham, pork, Swiss cheese, mustard and pickle slices pressed between slices of chewy Cuban bread.
In the other corner: Tampa, with a sizable Cuban diaspora of its own and a recipe slightly different from Miami’s, pressed on crustier bread and including — to Miami’s collective disgust — slices of salami.
Mr. Huse was the perfect referee. Gregarious and always eager to cook extravagant meals for friends, he thought about food the way some sports fans follow their favorite teams — with irrepressible enthusiasm bordering on obsession.
As more and more food writers called seeking his opinion on the true birthplace of the Cuban sandwich, Mr. Huse began a culinary investigation.
“People will tell you with passionate certainty about what their grandfather said,” Mr. Huse told The New York Times for an illustrated history of the Cuban sandwich in 2023. “I wanted to go deeper and explore the written record.”
The prevailing theory in Tampa was that a mishmash of immigrant communities had created the sandwich in the early 1900s. To Mr. Huse, that sounded fishy.
“This idea that in 1910, 1920, these different groups are all really chummy, and they’re like, throwing ingredients onto each other’s sandwiches — no, I don’t think so,” he told The Tampa Bay Times in 2021.
Scouring 150 years of restaurant menus, newspaper articles and advertisements, as well as interviewing Cubans in Miami and Tampa, Mr. Huse ultimately traced the sandwich’s origins to, it turns out, a rather obvious place.
“I can tell you it came from Havana — invented by Cubans, for Cubans — and the rest of the world discovered it and fell in love with it,” he told The Miami Herald in 2022, the same year he published “The Cuban Sandwich: A History in Layers.”
Written with Bárbara Cruz, a Cuban-born professor at the University of South Florida, and Jeff Houck, the vice president of marketing for the company that owns the Columbia Restaurant, the book examines the global forces that shaped the sandwich in the late 19th century and how it emerged in Tampa and Miami.
Once prepared by highly skilled meat carvers for Cuba’s elite, the layers of ingredients arrived on the island via new global trade routes from Europe and the United States. Advances in refrigeration technology allowed meat to be stored for long periods, guaranteeing freshness between shipments.
Cigar workers brought the sandwich to Tampa in the late 19th century. A similar sandwich was eaten in the Miami area in the early 1900s, but it didn’t become a staple in the city until the 1950s, when a wave of immigrants arrived after the Cuban revolution.
Mr. Huse found the whole dispute exhausting.
“Can’t we both have the Cuban sandwich and be proud of it?” he told The New York Times for its illustration. “Why does there always have to be a ‘one’? Both communities have been brightened by the sandwich.”
Andrew Thomas Huse was born on March 20, 1973, in Elmhurst, Ill. His father, Thomas Huse, was a police officer in Chicago. His mother was a critical care nurse.
After vacationing in Clearwater, Fla., the family decided to move there in 1979. His parents divorced a year later.
By age 6, Andy was already an author.
“He was writing books that he would make up about all kinds of adventures,” his mother said in an interview. “There was one about somebody who kicked a football and it started going through the whole neighborhood and everybody was chasing it and pretty soon the whole town was there and nobody could catch it.”
Mr. Huse studied history and English at the University of South Florida and graduated in 1996. He also received master’s degrees in history and library science from the university, where he was mentored by Gary Mormino, a social historian.
“Andy was one of the first to get interested in this field that was emerging in the 1990s, of food history,” Professor Mormino said in an interview. “He was a prodigious researcher. If you needed an obscure source in the library buried in the archives, Andy was your best hope.”
His first book, “The Columbia Restaurant: Celebrating a Century of History, Culture, and Cuisine” (2009), was about Florida’s oldest restaurant. Opened in 1905 and still in business today, it was a gathering place for Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants during Prohibition, the Great Depression and beyond.
“From Saloons to Steak Houses: A History of Tampa” (2020) was a sojourn through eating and drinking spots that explored the city’s social mores, the emergence of organized crime, and the ways civil rights activists used restaurants as backdrops for protests.
Mr. Huse completed another book, a history of the Tampa Theater, shortly before his death. He had recently resigned from the university after being informed that his contract would not be renewed, according to The Tampa Bay Times.
In addition to his mother, Mr. Huse is survived by his stepfather, Howard Elwood, and a brother, Tim Huse.
When it came to Cuban sandwiches, Mr. Huse was an originalist.
“I had a Cuban that was made on a sesame seed bun!” he told The Tampa Bay Times in 2006. “At some restaurants, they’ll give you a Cuban sandwich that has not been pressed. How can you make a Cuban sandwich and not press it?”
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