I recently was on a long road trip to visit family for the holidays from the SouthEast to MidWest. That means a lot of radio time, which means, NPR, Christian pop, or country. I have an extremely limited tolerance for the latter two, so there was a lot of NPR. On NPR I heard an end of year book review sequence, and I had to look up one of the books. It turns out there is a podcast now cookbook on food history that I’d never heard of. The NPR guy described it as sounding like “a friends geeking out about their newest obsession to you”, and I’d say that’s a pretty accurate way to look at Sandwiches of History the Cookbook.
After a general review of equipment, there’s a sequence of discussions on the varieties and history of some key ingredients such as bread, butter, mayo, mustard, ketchup, and a few side bars on things like anchovy paste and the eternal “is a hotdog a sandwich” (and a pretty good definitive response). The general sandwich categories include tea/snack, club, surprising, vegetarian, international, open-faced/sauced, and sweet.
One thing I really liked is that each recipe cited the source and date, which gives it a sense of historical context. A lettuce sandwich (1902, The Ideal Cookbook) requires 2 crisp leaves of iceberg lettuce, salt, butter, 2 slices white bread, and 1 tsp. mayo. There’s also a note on other historically interesting things that happened during the year this recipe was published (the first movie theatre in LA, invention of the teddy bear, and birth year of John Steinbeck). Some recipes, including this one, come with “plus ups” which are modernizations that might make the ‘original’ a little more interesting; here, that would be the addition of thinly sliced tomato and/or addition of olive tapenade. Sometimes, an original ingredient, such as nasturtium (for the nasturtium leaves sandwich [1896]) might be used but a substitution more readily available provided (arugula in this case). The most interesting recipe from the tea/snack section (which contains both the nasturtium and lettuce recipes) has got to be the pineapple cucumber sandwich (1936). It’s chopped cucumber, pineapple, dressed in mayo, on buttered white bread.
There is also something called the Milwaukee Sandwich (it’s a club-type) that’s basically a standard club (turkey, bacon, tomato, lettuce) with the addition of fried oysters, with tartar sauce. What this has to do with Milwaukee the city, I don’t know, and neither does the author, but there it is, along with an updated version (aka ‘recipe remix’) that swaps fried oysters for smoked. I also don’t see why the Schmancy Ham Sandwich is “surprising” because it’s just ham salad. The surprise section also has what might be the most basic but also slightly odd recipe in the book, the “toast sandwich” which is buttered, salted-peppered toast, two slices, layered, and sliced. Likewise, a “Sandwich” consisting of two slices of swiss cheese, with some butter in between.
The vegetarian section consists of a couple of grilled cheese type things, a mushroom option, a lentil-based, option, a potato Indian stuff option and few others. The international section does actually cover multiple continents, and it’s an odd contrast to have a recipe for ron jia mo buns (a Chinese option that dates back to the Qin dynasty) in the same breath as the chip buttie (a UK thing which I’ve seen in the wild, which is basically bread (I always saw it in a sub-style baguette) with French fires as the filling, maybe some mayo or salt/vinegar. In the open-faced section, there’s actually a recipe for “hot dog sandwich” (with citation) alongside the expected things like the Kentucky hot brown, a cheeseburger with both melted cheese and cheese sauce, and sloppy joe.
Two of the strangest and one of the most interesting are actually in the sweet section which I’d call dessert with one exception (coming to that in a sec). First the one I actually want to try, the chopped date and orange sandwich, which is as the title suggests chopped dates, orange slices, some chopped nuts, a sprinkle of sherry, and finished off with a dusting of powdered sugar. Then we get the peanut butter and cherry sandwich, which is peanut butter and maraschino cherries. The one I probably won’t try is the “mock banana sandwich” dating to WWII. The mock banana involves parsnips and banana extract, which sounds gross. I hate banana flavored candy, although I do like the actual fruit, so I’m staying away from this one. The dessert exception is the “dusty nuttergoose sandwich” which is the author’s own creation (he explains the origin, from 2002 which is technically ‘of the past’). What is this thing? Peanut butter, cherry pop rocks, and smoked duck breast slices, between waffles