Of the ones I’m familiar with, Olive loaf was always disgusting to me. I ate fluffernutters as a kid, but now find them to sweet. I used to drink tea with more sugar than would dissolve, too.
Finger sandwiches seem like a normal buffet food. They are sometimes finger-shaped. Whether they are good depends entirely on what kind of sandwiches they are, and whether they are fresh. It’s just a form factor, not a type of sandwich.
I prefer liverwurst on a single slice of brown bread, at breakfast, in a German hotel buffet.
I never liked sloppy joes, mostly because they are such a mess. And no, i don’t think they are sandwiches.
That was the whole point of sandwiches, as invented by the Earl of Sandwich. From the Wikipedia entry on “sandwich”:
The sandwich is named after John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, an eighteenth-century English aristocrat.[8][9] It is commonly said that Lord Sandwich, during long sessions of cribbage and other card games at public gambling houses, would order his valet to bring him roast beef between two pieces of toasted bread.[9] He was fond of this form of food because it allowed him to continue gambling while eating, without the need for a fork, and without getting his cards greasy from eating meat with his bare hands.
Oh, and the "hot brown* sounds delicious. But I’ve never seen one.
There’s a difference between getting your hands greasy from eating a steak with your bare hands, and having some seasoned ground beef fall out of the bun and onto the plate.
I make BLTs with a softly boiled egg on them. Does it magically transform it into a not-sandwich simply because the runny yolk can drip? What about grilled cheese sandwiches? They have grease on the outside - it’s impossible to eat a well-made grilled cheese without a napkin.
Yeah, my southern-raised husband likes those. Even though he lost his southern accent before he even met me, he calls them ‘mahta sandwiches’. I’m not sure he adds salt and pepper.
Of the OP’s list, I think I’ve eaten exactly one, sloppy joes, as they served them in my grammar school cafeteria like once a week. I hated them. Of the others, I may have been offered a few but was able to gratefully refuse. They all sound abominable.
I must be some sort of freak, as I recognized all on the list except the coronation chicken, and that appears to be a variation of chicken salad. One year after we returned from midnight Mass, my mom made Scottish Woodchuck. (We didn’t say “Scotch,” I guess because it would would have meant the booze.) It was good.
When I was a kid, we had no cafeteria, so we brought sandwiches every day. I liked olive loaf but went through a pickle-and-pimento loaf phase. I also liked two others not on the list: sandwich spread, which was made by Oscar Mayer and came in a plastic tube like their braunschweiger did, and beer loaf (also OM), which, sadly, contained no beer.
Do they still sell headcheese? I’ve never had it. My mom said it was good, but then she’d eaten stuff I considered weird, like songbirds and beef lungs and calves brains (the first one only as a kid in Italy).
I would like to note that there are no woodchucks, an eastern North American species, in Scotland. It’s woodcock, which apparently is a delicacy in Great Britain, hence the reason for the frugal aka ‘scotch’, alternative. Which I’d never heard of and doesn’t sound like it would even faintly resemble woodcock, which is related to snipe and sandpipers.
I acknowledge that sandwiches have become pretty much any food on bread, and routinely use the word that way. But i don’t think it’s weird to ask whether the thing can be eaten neatly with the hands. And yeah, i kinda downgrade a sandwich that’s apt to “leak”. I see it as a sort of defective sandwich, i guess, that i might deconstruct with a knife and fork on my plate.
I’ve only ever had open faced sloppy Joe’s, and i hated them. I hated the soggy bread and the mess. I didn’t hate the flavor, but i didn’t especially like it. Trying to pick up a two faced one and having the insides slide out as i tried to eat it would be an unpleasant meal for me.
Oddly, i like a lot of hands-on food like lobster in the shell, or whole nuts, … But i guess i like to segregate that kind of food from tidier food.
I carve out some of the bread from the top bun, which does the trick nicely. We also tend to like them slightly less “sloppy” and don’t use as much liquid when making them. Reduces the sogginess of the bread (which I also despise, @puzzlegal ).
A range of jars of paste are still widely sold, so I think people must still eat it. I’ve maybe bought 2 jars in the last 5 years (but I ate it on toast, not in a sandwich).
The way to make less-sloppy joes (besides the obvious less sauce, but what kind of heathen takes away flavor?) is to first, lightly toast the bread, and second, put a slice of cheese on the bread before putting the slops on it.
As for flavor, use a barbeque sauce that you like. Or mustard. Or even ketchup (I won’t judge).
I’ve also made sloppy joes using tortillas. Either open like a taco, or folded like a burrito.
