Okay, I love sandwiches, I love corned beef and pastrami. It’s all good stuff.
But there is at least a loose limit to what a sandwich is, and to me, it’s that you have to be able to comfortably pick the whole thing up with your hands and eat it as a unit.
So these overstuffed monstrosities with a pound of sliced corned beef like this –
http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/9289/slymanscbjx1.jpg
That’s not really a sandwich. It’s just a pile of corned beef with a couple of slices of bread.
I tend to agree, but, for whatever reason, when it comes to corned beef and pastrami, that seems to be not atypical. See: Carnegie Deli, for instance. I was into my 20s before I discovered there’s a decent segment of the population that considers it normal. Even here in Chicago, we have an old-school Jewish deli/restaurant called Manny’s, and they do the same thing.
I share your disdain for over-piling meat on sandwiches. There is a fine line between “generous amount” and “that doesn’t work.”
Maybe the idea is to take out much of the meat to put in a to-go/doggy bag?
I think some places will give you a couple of extra pieces of bread to split it with someone else. At a charge, of course.
I’m also not a fan of those huge sandwiches. They are to big to bite into.
I also agree. If i have to take out half of the sandwich just to pick it up it is not a sandwich. When I take out half the contents and can pick it up then it becomes a sandwich.
For me a sandwich is a balance: you want chewy/toasty bread, lots of different vegetables, some bacon or avocado or egg or something else really fatty, some meat, and some mayo/mustard/hot sauce/other condiments. If any ingredient gets out of hand, it’s not as good. A lot of lousy sandwich places think more meat makes a better sandwich, but they’re wrong.
Agree. The only thing to do with one of those behemoths is put 3/4 of the meat in a foiled bag for home, then eat what’s left now. What’s worse are monster burgers, which defy easy disassembly and removal of left-overs.
I agree and I am going to punch the next person that tries to sell me an ‘open faced sandwich’ in any form as well. I am on a strict diet. I don’t eat oxymorons.
I was going to say this. An open-faced “sandwich” is not a sandwich. It’s food served on top of a slice of bread.
Monte Christos are another “sandwich” that I suppose you might eat with your hands. Same as you could eat scrambled eggs with your hands, but in either case you’d look like Hellen Keller pre-Anne Sullivan.
I grew up on those. Love them, because they are the perfect balance of meat and toppings to bread when using hearty bread, which growing up in an Eastern European household, we didn’t have that squishy American bread around (although I do now.) But there’s no better name in English for them that I know of. Canapés comes somewhat close, but those are usually small and bite-sized. If you linguistic sandwich purists have any better idea for a name, let me know.
I just thought it was important to get in something here about the URL of Sandwich.
Or wait, these two are better: “www.earlofsandwichusa.com” - “John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich - Wikipedia”
The URLs of the Earls of Sandwich.
That is all.
Looks like an awesome sammich to me. Add some chips and a bottomless glass of sweet tea, maybe swap that wimpy bread out for a Po-Boy bread.
Don’t diss the Dagwood!
(But, yeah, I always wondered what the damn point was of the traditional Dagwood. You have to disassemble it to eat it…so why assemble it in the first place?)
While we’re at it with “open-faced sandwiches”: If you want to serve, say, turkey, gravy, and bread all in one dish, that needs to be eaten with a fork, why put the bread on the bottom? That’s going to squish it all down flat. You get a much better dish, IMO, by putting the bread on the top where it can stay puffy.
The one i swear is not a sandwich is when they put 4 ribs between two slices of bread and call it a sandwich with the 4 bones still there. Cannot eat that as a sandwich even less so than your pound of corny beef.
I’m not saying it’s a bad meal. I’m just saying it’s not a sandwich.
It’s just that’s the name for it English (and just plain “sandwich” in some other languages.) Everybody know what it means and there’s no better phrase for it.
Yeah, I’ll draw my line at those type of open faced sandwiches.