At Boston College, the Jesuit university in Chestnut Hill, Mass., there is the Screaming Eagle. It is a steak-and-cheese sandwich of the New England variety, which is to say it has little to do with the Main Line Philadelphia model. The Screaming Eagle is made with shaved steak and white American cheese and lashed with chipotle-spiked mayonnaise. It is piled into a warm submarine roll, often along with onions and peppers and mushrooms. Some students crumble Saltines over the top for added salt and bulk.

A Penn student would not recognize the Screaming Eagle as a cheese steak. A Drexel, Curtis or Temple kid would scoff. The sandwich is nothing like what you’d get at Pat’s or Geno’s, napped in Cheez Whiz and wrapped in waxed paper.

But the Screaming Eagle is an excellent sandwich all the same: fiery against the salt and fat, with a milky punch that allows the cheese and mayonnaise to become extensions of each other, dancers on the stage of bread. Lines to order them stretch throughout the college’s Corcoran Commons every day, students and administrators say, with rushes in the early evening and then again late. Nearly 80,000 are sold each academic year, according to Helen Wechsler, the director of B.C. Dining. This works out to an average of something like nine cheese steaks for every undergraduate.

Michael Kann, who is the associate director of food and beverage for the school, sent me the recipe. It proved to be bulletproof, sheet music for a weekend meal of uncommon flavor and deep satisfaction. Cheese steaks made at home may be terrifying to contemplate, but they are easy to complete. And serving them to middle-aged hacks with dim memories of college high jinks turns out to be just as successful as trying them out on Actual Youth, who inhale the things as if they were made of air.

I made two adjustments to Kann’s dispatch. I used Cheddar cheese in place of the white American. And I replaced the thin-shaved steak that is a hallmark of cheese steaks, whatever their geographic provenance, with skirt steak.