I just went to the local gas station to grab my lunch. The fridge had a selection from an unsalubrious Dublin-based sandwich company called “Momma’s Kitchen”. I’m vaguely aware of the low quality of the sandwiches they turn out, but I was in a hurry and didn’t have time to go anywhere else to grab a bite.
I selected Cajun Chicken. A look at the label promised “Chicken, cajun spices, mayo and horseradish on brown bread”. Mmmm mmmm mmmm. Sounds good. I unwrapped it. It looked the part. I bit into it.
Holy living shit on a cracker.
I’m nearly retching. What the fuck was that meant to be?
I pulled it apart. Let me enumerate the horrors I saw therein.[ol][li]Bread: it was certainly brown in colour. It was also damp, soggy, and misshapen. Most professional sandwich outfits use special bread of a certain consistency that doesn’t readily absorb moisture, and of a large and uniform shape. Not Momma. I’m guessing she gives backhanders to a sleazed up baker to retrieve the rejected shit from out of the dumpster. Either that or she wrests it from the mouths of ducks in the park.[/li][li]Next, butter. [/li]
Butter?
Who the fuck puts butter with mayo? What the fuck right has butter got to be in this monstrosity? Butter is a fatty substance, as is mayo. You have one or the other. Not both. You might want butter in, say, a jam sandwich, but not with something that’s already got a savoury sandwich base. This practice should be illegal. Indeed, no butter was advertised on the label, but Momma saw fit to slap about a quarter-inch of lard-like yellow crap on the inside of each slice of bread, nicely congealed due to the temperature of the fridge. I presume this is to act as a sealant to prevent the bread going soggy (see point 1). It didn’t work.
[li]Now I’m looking for the mayo and horseradish. There’s definitely something orangey scraped across the top of the butter. I can’t smell anything because of the smell of butter, but I’m assuming this is the promised condiment. See, the point of the mayo is to add moistness, as well as to convey flavour, and act as a vehicle for other seasonings. If you miss it out, or spread it to the depth of a single molecule, it won’t. There was no aroma of horseradish, either.[/li][li]Finally, the chicken. It is dry as a bleached Mojave desert skull, with the texture of toilet paper. It is somewhat orange in color. It too smells of butter.[/li]
One of the many things it lacks is the slightest touch of cajun spices (I suspect they just sprayed the bits of chicken orange with food colouring). Does Momma actually know what “cajun” means? When sniffing or chewing this sandwich, do I find myself transported to a steamy bayou, munching down on fiery hush puppies and crapaud while listening to zydeco? Do I fuck. I am, in fact, transported to a butter factory on a Dublin industrial estate, a few yards from a corrupt bakery.[/ol]The whole managed to be both soggy and dry at the same time. How can this be? Well, the bread pulped immediately and stuck to the roof of my mouth, leaving me with slowly-melting shards of solid butter, against which slid tasteless unlubricated dry chicken pieces. Then my saliva hit it, and it turned merely into a claggy paste, cut through with liquified fat.
Hmmm, now I’m starting to get it - mayo and spices = expensive; butter = cheap.
The conniving bitch did the ol’ switcheroo.
Momma lied to me. The only part of the label that was honest was the word “sandwich”, in that the bread-like substance did appear, for the most part, to surround the filling. But apart from that instance (which I suspect happened purely by serendipity) she has dissembled and obfuscated, and possibly poisoned me. I’m particularly aggrieved to have been suckered by the whole butter/mayo bait-and-switch routine. If I were labelling it in line with trades descriptions legislation, I’d have called it “butter and dirty bread slop sandwich with unidentifiable cardboard/meat pieces”.
I can’t believe I paid €2.85 for this sorry pile of shite, and I can’t believe a chicken died to create it.
