Cameron Esposito: Chicago Italian Beef Sandwich
Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle
Rachel Belle
4.4 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Comedian Cameron Esposito wants to be clear: she's not from Illinois, she's from Chicago. Specifically, Little Italy, where her Italian American family has lived and ate red sauce and melted mozzarella for generations. Cameron is sentimental about Chicago's famed Italian beef sandwich, a big, sloppy, drippy, delicious mess that she has given up for a vegetarian lifestyle in Los Angeles.
Chicago's Al #1 Italian Beef claims to be the inventor of the Italian beef, and host Rachel Belle gets the history from owner Chris Pacelli, who has worked in his family's business in some capacity for more than 60 years.
Plus! Cameron and Rachel ponder the age-old question: "Is guacamole a lesbian food?" and Cameron reveals the unorthodox midnight snack she invented while working long, late hours on the road.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights. |
| 0:05.8 | Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show. |
| 0:11.6 | Cairo, Seattle. |
| 0:30.7 | I'm Rachel Bell, and this is your last meal, a show about famous people and the stories behind the foods they love most. |
| 0:35.6 | Today on the program, stand-up comedian and actor Cameron Esposito. |
| 0:40.6 | As someone who loves to eat sour cream straight out of the carton drizzled with tapatio, |
| 0:46.2 | I was really excited to talk to Cameron about her propensity for odd food combinations. |
| 0:52.6 | Growing up, a sandwich that I really loved that I still stand by is peanut butter and pickles. |
| 0:56.8 | That is a perfect sandwich. Very salty and also sweet. |
| 1:01.4 | Very nice. Good crunch. But we are barely scratching the surface with peanut butter and pickles. |
| 1:08.1 | Cameron goes from mild to wild when we talk about some of her wacky snacks. Cameron is a proud Chicago native and very sentimental about some of the food she grew up with. |
| 1:11.8 | So I chat with Chris Pacelli, owner of Al's number one Italian beef, a Chicago institution that's been selling beef sandwiches for 82 years. |
| 1:21.0 | Anybody that lives in this city knows about Italian beef. |
| 1:24.1 | See, I went to New York one time to present this end, the today's show was it? And they didn't |
| 1:29.1 | know what I had. You know, I was like selling a Martians. You know, they didn't know what this was. |
| 1:34.3 | But first, my conversation with Cameron Esposito. Cameron hosts a podcast called Query, where |
| 1:43.0 | she interviews famous and fascinating folks who identify as queer. |
| 1:47.1 | And back in the day, she used to host a BuzzFeed web series called Ask a Lesbian. |
| 1:51.6 | And I had a question I was dying to ask her. |
| 1:54.8 | One of my gay friends, Heather, who I love, always claims things as lesbian that I'm like, |
| 2:00.8 | that's, I thought that was just the thing for |
| 2:02.6 | everyone. |
... |
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