“A Wild Bear sandwich was just rag bologna with rat cheese on a hobo bun,” said the oysterman (an older feller, about my age) who used to make them years ago for the young people who every summer would flock to the small dock at what is now Virginia’s Shooting Point Oyster Company.
It’s unlikely that more than one of those ingredients will be familiar to most readers. Bologna is bologna and rag bologna is simply the sausage, shredded.
Rat cheese was, according to the oysterman, “just sharp cheese.” An internet search confirms that the cheese that went by this unflattering moniker was usually just inexpensive cheddar.
Hobo buns were long cinnamon rolls, frosted.
To make the Wild Bear, the hobo bun was split and dressed with bologna and cheese. “No mustard or mayonnaise,” the oysterman told me.
Individual locations around the United States, and probably the world, prepare sandwiches unique to the local population. Our own 7 Sandwich specializes in making traditional regional sandwiches from Mexico, the Middle East and elsewhere.
I’m not entirely certain that it’s local, but one sandwich that I haven’t seen anywhere but in the Midwest is the fried bologna sandwich, the kind that we enjoy every year at the Taste of Melrose Park. When I tell people from other parts of the country about the fried bologna sandwich, usually served on white bread with mustard, they look at me funny…probably the same way you looked when I explained the Wild Bear.
 And that’s the thing about regional sandwiches. They don’t seem to sound good to anyone outside the region in which they were born. And maybe, sometimes, not even then.
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