Col. Sanders Ebola

From this blog.

There is a Right and Wrong Way to Build a Sandwich. I'm Sorry.

When I can't get myself together well enough to make my own sandwiches for lunch, I buy them from the local university so-called catering service on campus. These [adjectival and adverbial expletive] [noun expletives] don't know or care about how to build a sandwich. Typically the meat is on top. Then there's a weird set of understoreys, usually lettuce, then cheese, then tomatoes, or similar. It's done systematically, by the dozens, so I wonder why do they do it (vehemently) systematically wrong when it could be done systematically right?

My ideal for a sandwich is thus:

By convention there are two pieces of bread, excepting the delightful Club Sandwich, which has three. The single-slice "Open-Faced Sandwiches" of my youth are emphatically not sandwiches: you may as well call salsa on a tortilla chip or Cheez-Whiz on a Ritz an "open-faced sandwich" if you accept the single-slice paradigm. So-called "wraps" are a topic for another day but they are not sandwiches (also, Spoiler alert: there is no such food as a "wrap", and I refuse to eat any thing so-named). So now it's clear what I am and am not referring to here.

Two pieces of bread. On these pieces of bread are spread such condiments as mayonnaise, mustard, perhaps even horseradish, butter, cream cheese, chutney, olive oil, aioli or ketchup. Or Vegemite! Or Nutella ... or an olive tapenade. Or whatever. People always spread stuff, whether you like it or not. We all know that.

Anyhow, between the bread, at the bottom is the meat. [NB: Often the sandwich is named after the meat, e.g., Roast Beef Sandwich.]

Above it is the cheese.

Then leafy greens, if they are in the sandwich. If you have juicy stuff like tomatoes, that goes above the lettuce.

Crackers, Ruffles, pickles -- those will be be around the lettuce layer but below the tomatoes.

And all for good reason. To wit:

The point of a sandwich is the meat, or in non-meat sandwiches the cheese, or eggplant, or garden burger, etc. If you make a PBJ (because you're high or nostalgic probably), the peanut butter is on the bottom -- especially if it's crunchy/chunky (which it should be). When you bite into a sandwich the first thing after the bread that you should taste and feel is the meat. If it doesn't reach your tongue quickly, then you are just mashing a bunch of random stuff up in your mouth with no discrimination -- like a fucking swine plowing through offal. (I acknowledge that certain sandwich-eaters [e.g, fucking swine] would disagree with this characterization of themselves as fucking swine. Thou dost protest too much, says I.)

Back to it: Cheese is known to be awesome, so you want to taste it next. It melts as you chew it and it blends with the fats and proteins of the meat on your tongue, as your saliva starts digesting it. Why is a blue cheese burger so good? Because it doesn't enter your mouth on top of a salad between two pieces of bread.

Leafy greens taste less good (on average) than ripe tomatoes, grilled peppers, etc., but they impede the incisors cutting through the upper layers, so it's best to have the tomatoes above them, otherwise the tomatoes et al. get shmooshed out the sides as you bite.

This is my logic. If you don't care about the construction of a sandwich, you shouldn't be making them. A good, coherent sandwich made with even perfunctory care can be a minorly awesome thing that restores you at midday and puts you in a good place. A sandwich of apparent madness -- ass-over-teakettle, or trína chéile as my Irish mom would say -- is antagonizing. And no one needs to be antagonized by a goddamned sandwich.

Horsemeat Scandal has IKEA by the Balls

I have no real reason to post about the news that IKEA has discovered horsemeat in its "iconic" swedish meatballs. I just wanted to write that title.

It is curious that IKEA, which ships these meatballs all over the world to their famous little restaurants inside the stores, somehow knows that the horsemeat is only in the European meatballs, and not in the US or other meatballs. If they just figured out there was horse in the European balls, how can they know anything about the general supply chain at this point?

Knowing how some people really love shopping at IKEA, and the sense of well-being it brings to them, I send my condolences out to those whose illusions have been shattered by this event.

Canned Meat Taste Test in Belize

I did my dissertation fieldwork in southern Belize and had some very good food, some not good food, and also was influenced by some food prejudices (of specific gringos) that I worked to overcome. In the Fall of 2010 I made it a point to survey the various Spam-oid canned meats available done there, after I realized I'd been eating American cheese/tortilla sandwiches for months at a time (and therefore being starved) largely because a certain dipshit buying food thought Spam et al. was just too low class to eat. Oh, and any meat sandwich would rot by noon in the tropics. Bullshit. I decided to just say no to starvation, and for my short trip started to make sandwiches with canned meat and make a critical evaluation of their merits.

Three of the four are pictured above (the fourth was Hormel "Black Label"). I cut the loaf/block vertically into ~1/4" slabs and made two sandwiches from each can. I think I used mayonnaise and slabs of Western Dairy "cheddar" "cheese" on all of them. So I had each two days running while out hiking around in corn fields and hauling corn around and doing lightly strenuous work.

Overview:
I was glad to have protein, fat, salt and flavor for lunch in every case. There's a reason these things exist in the tropics, and only dicks scoff at canned meat. Meat is good. My Maya co-workers have meat for lunch when it's available. The main axes of difference were texture, flavor(ing), and clarity of palate. Seriously, clarity of palate. Don't fuck with me in a taste test, Belize or Normandy or anywhere.

The Rankings:

4th: Hormel Black Label. Of the four this was clearly the most processed of them all, and the slippery (silky would be giving it too much credit) texture signals that you're probably dealing with the slimmest leavings of the butchering process. Taste was salty, but otherwise bland; like super cheap bologna. No real sense of a unique, distinct flavor. It's like they aren't even competing for a greater share of the market that Spam, Dak, etc., comprise. Hmm. I sense a horrible insight to be revealed pending further reflection. 

3rd: Tulip "Pork Luncheon Meat". In fact it's an even split between Tulip and (#2) classic SPAM overall, but Spam wins on texture. Tulip, being the second Danish entry into this melee, manages to carry the ground-up bologna texture and flavor of Hormel Black Label up as step, mostly by being cleaner and less-preservative tasting. But they're obviously not gunning for Dak in terms of respectability. If you close your eyes you have the sense that you are eating a hot dog near the mermaid statue in Copenhagen, and therefore you make allowances for the slightly odd taste of the hot dog. If you like hotdogs, this is #2.
  
2nd: Spam. Fighting (as ever) for primacy in the canned meat dept. is Msr. Spam. As noted, if you don't like the Spam taste, and prefer North American hotdog-ish stuff, Tulip is #2 and this is #3. Spam in North America amounts to a bad word for most people, but when you've had cheaper canned meats you realize how much worse this stuff can get. The texture is more firm than the "mousse" style (if you can call it that) of Tulip and Hormel, and overall the flavor is fairly light and not especially chemically. For those who have been estranged from Spam, the gelatinous goo that used to encase the loaf appears to be a thing of the past. I have an image of my dad spooning that stuff up and slurping away at it when I was a kid that still repulses me. Clearly Spam saw there was room for improvement and they took the horse (hah. European food supply.) by the reins.

1st: Dak. When most readers of this blog (or both readers, I should say) hear "Dak" they probably think of Luke Skywalker's doomed co-pilot on Hoth who gets stomped on by an AT-AT. His pointless and melodramatic death was echoed by that of Goose in Top Gun a decade later (seriously, he was killed because he hit the ejected canopy? gimme a break. (Cue Nell Carter: My game is The Bible!)). But the rest of the world knows Dak as a fine canned Chopped Ham. It is actually finer in taste than Spam, and I believe it has more variation in the texture, so there's some depth that develops as you chew. And it has a Viking of the front and the can itself is a delightful Rosetta Stone of European languages. I was going to bring one back to use as a teaching aid in archaeology classes, but I ate what I had and got too loaded the night before I left to stop at the store.

So Dak is where it's at for me. If I end up being starved by idiots down there again, I will pony up (hah! again with the horse jokes! how do I do it?) the 5 Belize dollars (2.50 USD) to get my supply of this stuff. It goes to show that it pays to be open to new foods, and that even when the choices are limited you can still try to get the best quality food available.