Real men eat what?

In the Butterbean family, the measure of a man has nothing to do with quiche. Instead, real men eat sandwiches. And the more you can put on your sandwich and still get a mouth on it, the better man you are. Dagwood is a family idol, but Mr. Butterbean is quite heroic as well.

Mr. B. says to me, “You had a busy day. Let’s have something simple for dinner.” What he means is, “Let’s have sandwiches,”—that simplest of foods! To have one we only need (minimum) bread, butter, mayo, meat, salt and pepper, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, onions, more meat, more cheese, and a space large enough to set it all out on. Beyond all of that we still might need to include things like hot peppers, vinegar and oil, cilantro, lemon pepper, sprouts, mushrooms—and the list goes on.

I am here to tell you that there is no simple or efficient way to make a sandwich in a kitchen. The first assembly line was probably not invented by Henry Ford; but instead, envisioned by the little old neighborhood deli-man in his pastrami-ridden brain while searching for a stress-free way to build a sandwich. A factory assembly line might work, (in fact it does at Subway) but the modern kitchen isn’t set up for it.

The main problem is that all of the components for a sandwich are kept in different places. The bread is in the drawer, the knives are in another drawer, the meat and butter is in the fridge, the pickles are on the shelf. Some things are not in the cupboard or the frig, but are still at the store instead. By the time you get everything gathered up, used, and put away, you need a nap.

The sandwich-maker (me) begins to think that it takes more macho to build this thing than it does to eat it. But the most fearless person of all is the one who asks for another sandwich just after you get all of the ingredients put away.

Now, I’m not sure I trust people who like to mix too many different foods together, and I am not of the opinion that anything tastes good on a slice of bread. I’m the odd one in the family. (I happen to like plain bread, and not just because making a sandwich is so much work.) I happen to think there are some exceptions to the “everything-tastes better-on-bread” dictum. Interestingly, those things are of that class of foods that are usually associated with bread and mayonnaise—for instance, a nice juicy slice of roast turkey or a home-grown tomato.

And back to bread—what tastes better than freshly baked bread? I expect that French chefs cringe when they see people desecrating croissants with even the best of meat and cheese. Croissants were not made to be covered with anything. They stand on their own, or should. So do a few other kinds of bread.

It’s like my brother once quipped when I announced that I had dinner under control because I had just baked bread and bought baloney (he’s a real wimp who only puts butter on his sandwiches): “Sounds like a waste of a perfectly good piece of bread to me.”

I'm not sure whether that was an assessment of the bread or the baloney, but now, there's one thing that does taste better on bread.