Barry Enderwick
Appearances
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
You know, sandwiches seem to cut across all cultures, cuisines. They've been around for a long time, and they've got an enormous amount of flexibility to them, from their portability to what bread is used to what goes in between the bread.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Well, the real story is we don't know where they came from per se. I would say that John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, did an excellent job of getting his name on it. It's rumored that in 1762 or thereabouts, he was playing cards and was really into it and didn't want to get up. So he had someone bring him meat between two slices of bread.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
His compatriot said, you know, I'll have what sandwich is having. And by 1777, there was a recipe in a book for a sandwich. So it didn't take long. But in my exploration of old sandwiches, I've done a sandwich from China called the Rojiamo. And it was created around 200 BC.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And it's basically meat stewed in very warm spices, shredded, and then put into a griddle cake that's mostly split all the way. And it looks very much like a sandwich. So I don't know that he necessarily invented it, but he certainly got his name on it.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Oh, yeah, for sure. As long as bread's been baked, you know, I'm sure at some point when people started slicing it instead of tearing it, they probably started to put meat in between it or other things in between it and just sort of eating sandwiches that way.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
I mean, it was the evolution basically from the early days when it really was literally just meat between bread. It's just sort of evolved and expanded over time to where we have these rather monstrous looking sandwiches available from different chain outlets now. So I wouldn't say that there was a match moment where it happened. It just sort of grew. And is it everywhere?
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
I would say that you could find a sandwich pretty much anywhere in any country. You'd be able to find a version of a sandwich. I would not say that the sandwiches that we're used to seeing here in the United States, like the sub shops and things like that, are necessarily in every country. But you can pretty much find a sandwich in just about any cuisine.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And would you consider a hamburger a sandwich? I do consider it a sandwich. In fact, early menus used to call it a hamburger sandwich. And to me, it's, you know, you've got meat and other toppings between bread. That's a classic definition of a sandwich, if you ask me. Right. Well, then so would be a hot dog. That's correct. I do happen to think that a hot dog is a sandwich.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
I have two reasons behind that. One is very unsatisfying, and that is everything's made up. So if you want it to be a sandwich, it is. But the other more logic-driven one is that If you look at the hot dog bun, the bun is almost equal thickness on two sides and a very thin hinge. So the hinge is just there as an accommodation for the tubular meat.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
So it technically does fall into the category sandwich, in my opinion. Now, if you say, hey, let's go get a sandwich and you show up and there's hot dogs, there's going to be a disconnect because people just don't think in that way. But I think technically it does fall into sandwichdom. So what is your favorite sandwich? Boy, that changes so often depending on everything. Like how hot is it?
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
How hungry am I? One of my favorite ones is a more recent one called the tomato from Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. And it shouldn't be as good as it is. It's mind-blowingly delicious. It's thick Texas toast that's buttered and griddled. slathered in mayonnaise. They call for Duke's, which has a bit of a tang to it because it's made with apple cider vinegar.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Then you put down salted, roasted sunflower seeds, thick slices of tomato, salt, pepper, way too much basil, way too much dill, and a squeeze of lemon.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
and it is it shouldn't be as good as it is it's revelatory um so i love that i always love a good reuben uh like that is like my go-to if i'm in a sandwich shop and i don't know what to get that's always a solid move isn't it isn't it such a pleasure when you have not just a sandwich but anything like that where
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Yeah, you know, one of the things I do on Sandwiches of History is I do sandwiches of our history where I try to capture recipes that are being passed down within families but aren't necessarily in a cookbook. And I had that same experience with someone sent in something from the Upper East Coast, Northeast, where the grandfather would saute sardines in butter
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
then add maple syrup, and then chili flakes. And there were a couple other ingredients, and I thought, this is going to be horrific. And I tasted it, and it was the exact same thing. Like, how is this good? This isn't just good. This is great. So you never know. Yeah, you lost me at sardines.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
I think you can, for me, when I look at the sandwich recipes, you know, I'm making sandwich recipes from the 1800s, early 1900s, World War II, you know, through the Depression, then World War II. And then after World War II, you start to see odd combos of things that kind of, it's almost a reflection of the optimism and, you know, feeling after World War II in the United States.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
One example is a sophisticated club that, among other things as peanut butter, coconut, avocado, tomato, ham. And it shouldn't work, but it actually does. It works really well. But you start to see these ingredients being put together that wouldn't have been put together
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
previously and i think that's reflective of how the nation was and then it just went from there of course today we have so much uh so many different ingredients and so many different cuisines that we can access and infuse into the sandwich uh it's just gone crazy it's great yeah i wonder if like every family has some sandwich that is a little off the mainstream like my my dad used to eat
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And believe it or not, that's been in cookbooks too. You know, one of the things that I grew up eating was peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches. And I thought my brother invented it. Turns out it's a lot of old cookbooks. But yeah, no, I've done over 100 sandwiches of our history. You know, people say, my grandpa used to make this. My mom used to make this.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And some of them are great and some of them are not.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
so what's a really not great one i mean you've probably tried like all kinds of sandwiches so what's a really great one that you've tried uh you know i didn't care for the red onion and peanut butter sandwich that didn't really land for me that sounds horrible but i mean that to me that that sounds like a depression era sandwich where it was you needed to eat something these are the two things you had
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
You put them together and then that becomes just part of what you eat because that helped you get through a rough time.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Well, actually there, there's, uh, there are intersections in some of the older cookbooks, especially in the early 1900s, there was a movement towards health for the first time ever. Uh, and so there's a fair amount of vegetarian sandwiches, uh, in those books as well. Um, but they weren't necessarily focused on vegetarian. It would be a vegetarian cookbook maybe.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Um, but the sandwiches themselves would not be called vegetarian within a sandwich recipe book.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Okay. I mean, not if you're a vegetarian. But, you know, like, for example, that tomato sandwich that I referenced earlier from Turkey and the Wolf. I have yet to meet anyone who didn't absolutely love it. And I'm talking meat eaters. I'm a meat eater. And it blew my mind. So I tend to wait and see and kind of taste it and then get disappointed if need be.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Yeah, sandwiches. So what you're referencing is something called tea sandwiches. The other thing to consider is that sandwiches weren't always intended as the end all be all of a meal. They were part of a there were a course within a larger meal.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And so you have these diminutive sandwiches that are small and very minimal in their ingredients, you know, and not very hearty because they're not intended to actually fill you up. They're meant to accompany tea or to be sort of like a whet your appetite before we bring out the goose kind of thing. Why is a club sandwich called a club sandwich?
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Contrary to popular belief, it just evolved out of clubhouses in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Some people tend to think it's like chicken and lettuce under bread or something like that, and it's unfortunately no. It's clubhouses. And it's funny to see them emerge in the late 1800s and early 1900s and how varied they were relative to now.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Like some would have four slices of bread, some would have turkey, some would have chicken, some would have turkey and chicken. So it was pretty interesting. Well, what is the definition of a club sandwich? I don't know if there's a hard and fast definition, but I think you have to have at least three slices of bread. You have to have bacon. You have to have turkey or chicken.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
But it can be, you know, open to interpretation. I just had a club sandwich at Fuller's Coffee Shop in Portland, and they did it with chicken salad, which I had not had before, and it was delicious.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Well, I know that the first mention of that in print was in the Boston Cooking School magazine in 1901. The original sandwich was a piece of bread, peanut butter, another piece of bread, jelly, and then another piece of bread, which actually was pretty tasty. That was kind of a nice change up on the regular peanut butter and jelly, but that's the first mention in print of peanut butter and jelly.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Oh, sure. You get a little sweet. You get a little nuttiness. It's super easy. It doesn't go bad in your lunch bag as it sits there for hours. And it's tasty. To me, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I was a kid is almost like getting candy because it was so good.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint an exact origin on that. I just recorded yesterday something called a cheese dream sandwich, and it was from a cookbook in 1912. It was basically a grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't called a grilled cheese sandwich, but that's basically what it was.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
So it's hard to say when it was created or who created it, but it's been around for a long time, and it's a vegetarian sandwich.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
There's one from France called the pan bagnat and it's basically you make this sort of nice was salad but with anchovy fillets and tuna and you dress it and you put it into this hollowed out loaf and you wrap it really tightly with Saran wrap or cling film and you wait it down in the fridge overnight and all that dressing soaks into the bread. It does.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
The bread is crusty so it doesn't completely sog out. And you just get this amazing, delicious sandwich the next day. So that is definitely one that has stood the test of time because it's been around for quite a while. One more. One more. Okay. Well, I think the Reuben is a great example, particularly pastrami Reuben.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
You just basically have mustard, pastrami, sauerkraut, and then you griddle it. Oh, and Swiss cheese. And then you butter the outside and griddle it and get it nice and crispy. And it's just delicious. You get a little sharpness from the sauerkraut. You get the richness from the meat, a little bit of spice from the meat, a little spice from the mustard on there.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
The nuttiness of the Swiss cheese, the nuttiness of the Swiss cheese is fantastic. So that would be another one I'd recommend. Do you consider the tortilla wrap food, is that a sandwich? Not to me. To me, a tortilla is pretty uniform in thickness and it's wrapped around something as opposed to holding something. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Like the closest it gets would be for me would be a taco, but a taco is more of a sling. That said, you know, got wonderful tortas, many, many different kinds and they're delicious.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Well, you know how I mentioned that sliced bread was being sold in 1928? More people were buying it than baking it. Well, Fleshman's brothers had a dip in sales and they were concerned about it. So they got together with a marketing agency in New York and they came up with the Eat Fresh Yeast for Health campaign.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And this manifested itself in different ways, but one of them was a recipe from 1936 for the yeast sandwich, wherein you took a compressed yeast cake, added table sauce, which is Worcestershire sauce, mashed it up, and put it between buttered bread. It blows my mind that they actually convinced everyone to eat yeast like that, and it was terrible, obviously. Made for a terrible sandwich.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
I've never eaten wallpaper paste, but I imagine that's what it's like.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
I don't understand why, but I also figure, you know, if it's in a cookbook or in a section in a cookbook about sandwiches, I'm going to make it. I don't want to miss out on a possible delicious sandwich or horrible sandwich even that was from back in the day just because it doesn't have a top piece of bread.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
That gets back to my whole, like, you know, everything's made up, so why not just try everything?
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
Up until World War II, almost every sandwich in the United States started with buttered bread. Like, without doubt, without an exception, everything was buttered. World War II comes along, butter gets rationed, margarine starts to get a foothold.
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A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
And then by, I don't know, 1950s, 60s, buttering bread was not really done much at all, but it is still done to every sandwich in the UK and a lot of places in Europe. And it's interesting to make sandwiches of old, and people comment all the time, hey, what's with all this butter? And it's like, well, we used to do that, but we don't anymore.
Something You Should Know
A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich
One example is a sophisticated club that, among other things, has peanut butter, coconut, avocado, tomato, ham. And it shouldn't work, but it actually does. It shouldn't be as good as it is.