The Horseshoe was born in 1928 at the Leland Hotel in Springfield, Illinois, and it has never left its hometown. Chef Joe Schweska created it for the lunch crowd, naming it for the horseshoe shape of the original ham steak, with the fries representing nails and the sizzling platter standing in for the anvil. Whether that story is entirely true matters less than the sandwich itself.

This is not health food. This is not refined dining. This is a towering edifice of American appetite that laughs at portion control. The Horseshoe represents everything I love about regional American cooking: a dish born of local pride, perfected through generations of tweaking, and stubbornly resistant to leaving its place of origin.

The cheese sauce makes or breaks the experience. It descends from Welsh rarebit, that British pub classic of melted cheese thinned with ale. Springfield cooks adapted it with American cheese for smoothness and a heavier hand with the cayenne. The sauce should pour like lava and taste sharp enough to cut through the richness of everything beneath it. Too thick and it clumps on the fries. Too thin and it runs off the plate. When you get it right, every forkful delivers the complete experience.