The Cornhusker Hotel's Reuben sandwich.
So much has been written on when and where the sandwich came to be. New York has laid claim to the Reuben as the brainchild of a deli owner, while Omaha claims to have pinpointed the sandwich's origins to the Blackstone Hotel, along with the tale that a late-night poker game led to some hunger pangs and a call to the kitchen for the chef to rustle up some provisions.
It was then and there that the chef, or so we're told, created the first Reuben.
Not true, says Cox and her sister, Sally Guenzel.
The first Reuben, they insist, was created in Lincoln more than a decade before America entered World War II — at the Cornhusker Hotel — by their father, a man named Reinhold Rebensdorf.
"He never wanted any notoriety for it, but that's the story," Guenzel says.
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Rebensdorf, a first-generation American, was born in Harbine, a tiny village southwest of Beatrice. His German parents, George and Marie, escaped Russia in 1906 and migrated to Nebraska after George was promised a job building railroad boxcars.
George died in a train accident in 1913, when Rebensdorf was 11 months old. His mother remarried and relocated to Lincoln's South Bottoms, where he became part of a blended family that included more than a dozen children.
At the age of 8, in order to help the family make ends meet, he was put on a bus to Paxton, where he worked in the sugar beet fields.
He'd come home and go back to school in the winters, but he never went further than the eighth grade.
In 1930, the 18-year-old was hired as a sandwich boy at the Cornhusker. Over the years, he would be promoted to sous chef and, after returning from serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, was hired as the Cornhusker's executive chef in 1946 — a job he held until 1970.
In his tenure as executive chef, he did everything. He designed the menus, ran the kitchens, did the ordering and even sculpted the ice carvings, a skill he had acquired over the years.
He also appeared on "The Tonight Show," starring Jack Paar, and cooked for many famous people, including eventual President Richard Nixon in 1956.
He left the Cornhusker to open the Nebraska Club and ran it until 1980, when he retired at the age of 69. Retirement was a relative term, though. His idle days were filled with catering jobs for various friends and community organizations like the Shriners and the Lincoln Community Playhouse — "really, he'd cook for anyone he knew," Cox said.
Rebensdorf, who died in April 1994 just days short of his 82nd birthday, loved Lincoln and his job. More than anything, he adored creating great food and seeing the impact it had on the people who ate it.
Rebensdorf, who went by the nickname "Reine," made a to-die-for black-bottom pie, as well as a corned beef hash that was renowned. He also won awards for his turkey galantine.
Still, it was the sandwich he created years before — long before the war — while still working as a sandwich boy that could be considered his legacy.
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Rebensdorf proved to be quite adept at the job — so competent that he was approached early on by AQ Schimmel, the oldest of four brothers who owned and operated a string of Midwest hotels that included both the Cornhusker and the Blackstone.
"He told me AQ Schimmel came to him and asked him to develop a sandwich for a new restaurant at the Blackstone Hotel," Guenzel said.
"He developed it (the Reuben) and they gave him credit for it," Cox said.
That was more than enough for Rebensdorf, a man who had escaped working the beet fields and had found his true life calling.
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The great Reuben debate gets contentious when food historians begin going back in time to check who made it first.
It was considered an indisputable fact here in Nebraska that the first Reuben was served sometime in the late 1920s at the Blackstone in Omaha.
The tale goes that a group of men gathered at the hotel to play poker when one of them, a fella named Reuben Kulakofsky, grew hungry in the midst of the game and called down to the kitchen for a snack.
The chef created a sandwich of corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, pressed hot on rye bread.
And the rest is history.
That is, until the food historians in New York tried to flex their muscles. One such authority, Andrew Smith, an author of 24 books, disputed the Blackstone theory with a letter to the editor of the New York Times a few years after Elizabeth Weil, a great-granddaughter in the Schimmel family, wrote in 2016 about the poker game at the Blackstone and the sandwich it inspired.
Smith claims that the sandwich was first made in 1914 — a decade before — by Arnold Reuben at his sandwich shop in New York City, and he and Weil fought for years trying to prove the other wrong.
Rebensdorf's daughters claim both of them are wrong, that the sandwich was actually made first — in Lincoln by their father — in the early 1930s.
"It's what we have always known," said Cox, who has framed old menus from the Cornhusker and has given them to her children to keep alive their grandfather's memory.
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So how did this fly below the radar for so long? Why is it that Lincoln stayed mum while New York and Omaha were fighting over the birthright to a sandwich that has gained worldwide notoriety and is featured on the menus of virtually every restaurant in America?
That's just Lincoln, Doug Evans says.
"To the people in Lincoln, it’s just not as important to them as it is to the people of Omaha or New York," he said. "Sauerkraut and (Russian) dressing? Big whoop.
"We’re not pretentious here. Omaha is different. It’s much more pretentious. I think that’s why the Schimmels, who had hotels all over the Midwest, chose to live here. This was their home base."
Perhaps the only debate you'll get in the Capital City is how it should be served: cold or grilled.
Sally Guenzel has adapted. She's tried the grilled version and can appreciate the goodness in the way the Swiss cheese melts into the other ingredients, causing the corned beef and sauerkraut to meld together, while also providing the much-appreciated crunch to the rye bread.
"I like them grilled, but they were meant to be served cold," she said.
Cox takes a by-the-book method when making Reubens. Like her father, she takes the time to squeeze all of the liquid out of the sauerkraut and then marinates it in the dressing overnight. She'd never consider using a skillet or panini press in the preparation.
"He meant it to be served cold," she says, noting that she last made six loaves' worth of Reubens on Christmas Day. "So that's how I serve them."
