The history of five unique American sandwiches

Everyone has a favorite sandwich, usually prepared according to strict specifications: turkey or ham? Roasted or roasted? Mayonnaise or mustard? White wheat or whole wheat We contacted five food historians and asked them to tell their stories about choosing sandwiches. These answers include staple foods such as peanut butter and jelly, and local delicacies such as fried noodles sandwiches in New England.

Together, they show how the sandwiches we eat (or the sandwiches we used to eat) make us full during our lunch break. In their stories, the themes are immigration and globalization, class and gender, resourcefulness and creativity.

Tuna salad sandwich smells like the home of working women (Megan Elias, Boston University)

Tuna salad sandwich comes from an impulse to save, but it is only a symbol of excess. Before supermarkets and cheap food appeared in the19th century, most Americans avoided wasting food. Chicken, ham or fish fillets will be mixed with mayonnaise for dinner and eaten with lettuce for lunch. Leftovers of celery, pickles and olives will also be stacked together as "condiments" for dinner.

These salads containing fish usually use salmon, white fish or trout. Most Americans don't cook (or even know) tuna.

Around the end of 19, middle-class women began to spend more time in public places, patronizing department stores, lectures and museums. Due to social customs, these women are not allowed to enter the pub where men eat, and the lunch restaurant is also opened for this new customer. The food they provide is exactly the same as the food they provide to each other at home: salad. Salads made at home are usually made from leftovers, while salads in lunch restaurants are made by themselves. Fish and shellfish salad is a typical food.

1949, an advertisement published in Women's House magazine announced "tuna revolution". When further social and economic changes bring women into the public eye as office and department store workers, they find fish salad waiting for them on the cheap lunch counter under the sponsorship of busy city workers. Unlike women's lunches, office lunches are time-limited. So, the lunch counter came up with the idea of providing salad between two pieces of bread, which could speed up the turnover of the table and encourage customers to have lunch.

When canned tuna was introduced in the early 20th century, lunch counters and home cooks could skip the step of cooking fish and eat salad directly. But there is also a negative side: the huge popularity of canned tuna has led to the growth of the global tuna industry, which has seriously consumed the stock of tuna and led to the accidental slaughter of millions of dolphins. An ingenious method of using dinner scraps has become a global crisis of conscience and capitalism.

I like my roasted rye.

Zhou Mei Sandwich is connected to the Falls River in Massachusetts in the east (University of Vancouver Island, Imogen).

"You will get a big plate of beef in Maine," warren zevon sang "Londoner" in his hit song 1978, which is a compliment to the popular China fried noodles.

In the same decade, Aarika and Happy Samoans, the family bands of a Chinese restaurant in Falls River, Massachusetts, used a song called "Fried Noodles Sandwich".

This song is a tribute to Zhou? Is it true?/You don't say. /You don't say. "

I first came into contact with Zhou Mei Sandwich when I was studying for my PhD at Brown University. Even the children of the owner of a Chinatown restaurant in Vancouver, I find sandwiches a bit mysterious. This led to a postdoctoral scholarship and a paper on China's entrepreneurship in New England.

Zhou Mei sandwich is a typical "East meets West" food, which is mainly related to Chinese restaurants in New England, especially in Falls River, a city crowded with textile mills near the Rhode Island border.

Sandwich, as animal food (including butter), has become a substitute for cts. Therefore, for vegetarians at these luncheons, peanut butter just replaced ordinary butter.

This is one of the earliest recipes. It is suggested that jelly and peanut butter should be placed in Boston cooking school magazine published by 190 1.

"stands for diversity," Julia Davis Chandler wrote. "One day, try to use three layers of thin bread, two layers of stuffing, one layer is peanut butter, whatever brand you like, make a sandwich, or bread fingers, and the other layer is raisins or begonia jelly. This combination is delicious, as far as I know, it is the most primitive.

Sandwiches were transferred from garden parties to lunch boxes in the 1920s, when peanut butter was mass-produced using hydrogenated vegetable oil and sugar. The marketers of Skippy brand regard children as a potential new audience, so the association with school lunch is forged.

The classic sandwich is made of soft sliced white bread, cream or chunks of peanut butter and jelly. Outside the United States, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are rare, and many people in the world find this combination disgusting.

These days, many people try to avoid white bread and hydrogenated fat. Nevertheless, sandwiches still have nostalgic appeal to many Americans, and high-end recipes-fresh peanuts, handmade bread or unusual jam-are now circulating online.

The daughters of the Scottish Woodcock Confederacy became creative (Andrew P. Harry, University of Southern Mississippi)

Woodcock, Scotland may not be Scotland. It's not even a sandwich, so it can be said that this dish has always been a favorite of Oxford students and members of parliament. Until the middle of the 20th century, it was usually cooked by putting anchovy sauce and eggs on toast.

Just like its cheese cousin, the Welsh rabbit (commonly known as rarebit), the name is very strange. Perhaps its name, if not its ingredients, caught the imagination of Miss Francis Lusk in Jackson, Mississippi.

The Joint Daughter of the Federal Cooking Book features the Scottish Woodcock. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi, CC BY-SA) inspired her to add a little British complexity to her entertainment. Together with her daughter, she made her own Scottish Woodcock edition 19 1 1 federal fundraising cookbook. Miss Lusk's Woodcock sandwich mixes filtered tomatoes with melted cheese, adds raw eggs, and then spreads a layer of paste between the layers of bread (or biscuits).

As food historian Bee Wilson said in her sandwich history, American sandwiches are different from English sandwiches because of their ambitious scale. Imitating the rising skyline of American cities, many people celebrate wealth by towering things.

But these sandwiches were sandwiches from the city lunch room, and later from the dining car. Sandwich is a way to combine British progress with American creativity at the home of the Southern Club.

For example, the joint daughter in the Confederate diet includes a "sweet bread sandwich", which is made by heating canned viscera (an animal side dish) and crushing the mixture between two pieces of toast. There is also a "green pepper sandwich", which is made of "very thin" slices of bread and "very thin" slices of green pepper.

This creative combination is not limited to the elite in the Mississippi capital. On the plantation in the Mississippi Delta, members of the coahama Women's Club provide colored paste sandwiches of English walnuts, black walnuts and olives. They also made a "friendship sandwich" with grated cucumber, onion, celery and green pepper mixed with cheese and mayonnaise. At the same time, the industrial elite in laurel, Mississippi provided bacon and egg paste sandwiches and sardine cream sandwiches.

Not all these mixed foods are covered with a piece of bread, so purists may not want to call them sandwiches. But these ladies did it-they proudly tied their original works with ribbons.

This article was first published in Dialogue magazine by KDSP· Paul Friedman, a professor of history at Chester Tripp Yale University, and Andrew P Harry, an associate professor of American cultural history at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Imogen Lin is a professor of anthropology at Vancouver Island University.

Ken Albala, Professor of Pacific History.

Megan Elias, director of food research at Boston University.

Associate Professor of Cooking Practice