Notable Sandwich Special: Literary Heroes
Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, where my editor David Swanson and I pull up a chair at the strange table that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches and invite you to dig in. We’ll be off next week, but for now—and in a change from our regularly scheduled programming—please enjoy this library of our favorite sandwiches of literature.
The association between sandwiches and great literature goes back to 1762, when Edward Gibbon observed “twenty or thirty of the first men of the kingdom” partaking of the unfamiliar meal (“a bit of cold meat, or a Sandwich”). This brief aside in the estimable historian’s diary is the first mention of the sandwich in the English language, and it would establish a connection that has endured for centuries.
Inspired by Gibbon—and having recently stumbled upon the below 2010 mock menu by Yeonjae Yuk—I decided to search out the most notable sandwiches in the history of literature, from Charles Dickens’ jambon in the 19th century to Zadie Smith’s bacon in 21st. “The sandwich—as substantial as was consistent with portability, and as cheap as possible–we hailed as one of our greatest institutions,” wrote Dickens in The Uncommercial Traveller in 1860. “We could never weep so comfortably as when our tears fell on our sandwich; we could never laugh so heartily as when we choked with sandwich…When the curtain fell for the night, we still fell back upon sandwich, to help us through the rain and mire, and home to bed.”
If this project has taught us anything it is that not all sandwiches are created equal, and here you’ll find everything from the fancy (Haruki Murakami’s smoked salmon with watercress, horseradish, and butter; James Joyce’s gorgonzola) to the simple (Toni Morrison’s butter-and-sugar; Margaret Atwood’s cheese) to the strange (Ernest Hemingway’s peanut butter-and-onion; Jesmyn Ward’s squirrel and hot sauce).
Come for Philip Roth’s BLT, stay for Saul Bellow’s liver.
— David
Mugby Junction
Charles Dickens, 1866
“This,” proceeds Our Missis, “was my first unconstitutional experience. Well would it have been, if it had been my last and worst. But no. As I proceeded further into that enslaved and ignorant land, its aspect became more hideous. I need not explain to this assembly, the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment sangwich?”
Universal laughter—except from Sniff, who, as sangwich-cutter, shook his head in a state of the utmost dejection as he stood with it agin the wall.
“Well!” said Our Missis, with dilated nostrils. “Take a fresh, crisp, long, crusty penny loaf made of the whitest and best flour. Cut it longwise through the middle. Insert a fair and nicely fitting slice of ham. Tie a smart piece of ribbon round the middle of the whole to bind it together. Add at one end a neat wrapper of clean white paper by which to hold it. And the universal French Refreshment sangwich busts on your disgusted vision.”
Ulysses
James Joyce, 1922
—Have you a cheese sandwich?
—Yes, sir.
Like a few olives too if they had them. Italian I prefer. Good glass of burgundy take away that. Lubricate. A nice salad, cool as a cucumber, Tom Kernan can dress. Puts gusto into it. Pure olive oil. Milly served me that cutlet with a sprig of parsley. Take one Spanish onion. God made food, the devil the cooks. Devilled crab.
—Wife well?
—Quite well, thanks... A cheese sandwich, then. Gorgonzola, have you?
—Yes, sir.
Nosey Flynn sipped his grog.
—Doing any singing those times?
Look at his mouth. Could whistle in his own ear. Flap ears to match. Music. Knows as much about it as my coachman. Still better tell him. Does no harm. Free ad.
—She’s engaged for a big tour end of this month. You may have heard perhaps.
—No. O, that’s the style. Who’s getting it up?
The curate served.
—How much is that?
—Seven d., sir… Thank you, sir.
Mr Bloom cut his sandwich into slender strips. Mr MacTrigger. Easier than the dreamy creamy stuff. His five hundred wives. Had the time of their lives.
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow, 1949
I finished the afternoon downtown, and while I was eating a liver sandwich at Elfman's and watching the unemployed musicians on the Dearborn corner, I saw a guy named Clarence Ruber passing and knocked on the plate glass with my ring till he noticed me and came in to talk. I knew this Ruber from Crane College, where he had run a baseball pool at the Enark Café; he was quiet and dirty-spoken, smooth in the face, fat behind, with a slow, shiny Assyrian fringe on his head and a soft-bosomed fashion of clothes, silky shirts, yellow silk tie, and gray flannel suit Looking me over, he saw that I was doing well too, in contrast to the Depression musicians and the other eaters, and we traded information.
The Wapshot Chronicle
John Cheever, 1958
“Well, is there anything you would like for breakfast?” Mrs. Wapshot asked.
“I'd love some peanut butter. If I could have a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of milk…”
“Well, I think that can be arranged,” Mrs. Wapshot said, and carrying the tray and smiling she went out of the room and down the stairs.
She felt no resentment at this miscarriage of her preparations and was happy to have the girl in her house, as if she was, at bottom, a lonely woman, grateful for any company. She had wanted a daughter, longed for one; a little girl sitting at her knees, learning to sew or making sugar cookies in the kitchen on a snowy night. While she made Rosalie's sandwich it seemed to her that she possessed a vision of life that she would enjoy introducing to the stranger. They could pick blueberries together, take long walks beside the river and sit together in the pew on Sunday. When she took the sandwich upstairs again Rosalie said that she wanted to get up. Mrs. Wapshot protested but Rosalie's pleading made sense. “I'd just feel so much better if I could get up and walk around and sit in the sun; just feel the sun.”
The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with
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Islands in the Stream
Ernest Hemingway, 1970
‘What the hell have you got so much black ass about today, Willie?’ Thomas Hudson asked.
‘I don't know. I woke up with it.’
‘Well, go down to the galley and see if that bottle of tea is cold and bring it up. Antonio's butchering the fish. So make a sandwich will you, please?’
‘Sure. What kind of sandwich?’
‘Peanut butter and onion if there's plenty of onion.'
'Peanut butter and onion it is, sir.’
‘And try to get rid of your black ass?’
‘Yes sir. Black ass gone, sir.’
When he was gone Thomas Hudson said, ‘You take it easy with him, Henry. I need the son of a bitch and he’s good at his stuff. He’s just got black ass.’
Sula
Toni Morrison, 1973
As Reverend Deal moved into his sermon, the hands of the women unfolded like pairs of raven's wings and flew high above their hats in the air. They did not hear all of what he said; they heard the one word, or phrase, or infection that was for them the connection between the event and themselves. For some it was the term "Sweet Jesus." And they saw the Lamb's eye and the truly innocent victim: themselves. They acknowledged the innocent child hiding in the corner of their hearts, holding a sugar-and-butter sandwich. That one. The one who lodged deep in their fat, thin, old, young skin, and was the one the world had hurt.
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood, 1985
Things are back to normal.
How can I call this normal? But compared with this morning, it is normal.
For lunch there was a cheese sandwich, on brown bread, a glass of milk, celery sticks, canned pears. A schoolchild's lunch. I ate everything up, not quickly, but reveling in the taste, the flavors lush on my tongue. Now I am going shopping, the same as usual.
I even look forward to it. There's a certain consolation to be taken from routine.
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy, 1992
By noon he was riding a farmland road where the acequias carried the water down along the foot-trodden selvedges of the fields and he stood the horse to water and walked it up and back in the shade of a cottonwood grove to cool it. He shared his lunch with children who came to sit beside him. Some of them had never eaten leavened bread and they looked to an older boy among them for guidance in the matter. They sat in a row along the edge of the path, five of them, and the sandwich halves of cured ham from the hacienda were passed to left and to right and they ate with great solemnity and when the sandwiches were gone he divided with his knife the freshbaked tarts of apple and guava.
American Pastoral
Philip Roth, 1997
In Chicago the loneliness had been so all-enveloping, she felt it as a current coursing through her. There wasn't a day, on some days not an hour, when she did not set out to phone Old Rimrock. But instead, before remembering her childhood room could completely undo her, she would find a diner or a luncheonette and sit on a stool at the counter and order a BLT and a vanilla milk shake. Saying the familiar words, watching the bacon curl on the grill, watching for her toast to pop up, carefully removing the toothpicks when she was served, eating the layered sandwich between sips of the shake, concentrating on crunching the tasteless fibers from the lettuce, extracting the smoke-scented fat from the brittle bacon and the flowery juices from the soft tomato, swilling everything in with the mash of the mayonnaised toast, grinding patiently away with her jaws and her teeth, thoughtfully pulverizing every mouthful into a silage to settle her down—concentrating on her BLT as fixedly as her mother's livestock focusing on the fodder at the trough-gave her the courage to go on alone. She would eat the sandwich and drink the shake and remember how she got there and go on. By the time she left Chicago she had discovered she no longer needed a home; she would never again come close to succumbing to the yearning for a family and a home.
The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with
a paid subscription.
The Savage Detectives
Roberto Bolaño, 1998
I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a tall glass of milk, and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich with oyster sauce and Dijon mustard. When I finished I was still hungry, so I made myself a second sandwich, this time with cheese, lettuce, and pickles bottled with two or three kinds of chilies. This second sandwich didn't fill me up, so I decided to go in search of something more substantial. In a plastic container on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, I found the remains of a chicken mole; in another container I found rice—guess they were leftovers from that day's dinner—and then I went looking for real bread, not sandwich bread, and I started to make myself dinner. To drink I chose a bottle of strawberry Lulu, which really tastes more like hibiscus. I ate sitting in the kitchen in silence, thinking about the future. I saw tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, fire. Then I washed the frying pan, plate, and silverware, brushed away the crumbs, and unbolted the door to the courtyard. Before I left, I turned out the light.
White Teeth
Zadie Smith, 2000
“I think,” replied Magid, slowly surveying the dusty chalkboard menus on the wall, and then turning back to Mickey, his face illumined, “I should like a bacon sandwich. Yes, that is it. I would love a juicy, yet well-done, tomato-ketchuped bacon sandwich. On brown.”
Oh, the struggle that could be seen on Mickey's kisser at that moment! Oh, the gargoylian contortions! It was a battle between the favor of the most refined customer he had ever had and the most hallowed, sacred rule of O'Connell's Poolroom. NO PORK.
Mickey's left eye twitched.
“Don't want a nice plate of scrambled? I do a lovely scrambled eggs, don't I, Johnny?”
“I'd be a liar if I said ya didn't," said Johnny loyally from his table, even though Mickey's eggs were famously gray and stiff, "I'd be a terrible liar, on my mother's life, I would.”
Magid wrinkled his nose and shook his head.
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
Gary Shteyngart, 2002
Meanwhile, in the cluttered back office, junior clerk Vladimir Girshkin—the immigrant's immigrant, the expatriate's expatriate, enduring victim of every practical joke the late twentieth century had to offer and an unlikely hero for our times-was going at it with the morning's first double-cured-spicy-soppressata-and-avocado sandwich. How Vladimir loved the unforgiving hardness of the soppressata and the fatty undertow of the tender avocado! The proliferation of this kind of Janus-faced sandwich, as far as he was concerned, was the best thing about Manhattan in the summer of 1993.
Kafka On the Shore
Haruki Murakami, 2002
As always my lunch is the cheapest box lunch from the little shop at the train station. We talk for a while, and Oshima urges half his sandwiches on me.
“I made extra today, just for you,” he insists. “Don't take it the wrong way, but you look like you're not eating.”
“I'm trying to make my stomach shrink,” I explain.
“On purpose?” he asks.
I nod.
“You're doing that to save money?”
Again I nod.
“I can understand that, but at your age you need to eat, and fill up whenever you get the chance. You need your nutrition.”
The sandwich he's offering me looks delicious. I thank him and start eating. Smoked salmon, watercress, and lettuce on soft white bread. The crust is nicely crunchy, and horseradish and butter complete the sandwich.
“Did you make this yourself?” I ask.
“No one's about to make it for me,” he says.
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward, 2011
By the time the meat is done cooking, has turned brown and small with as many hard edges as a jewel, the boys have come. Marquise is slicing at the meat with his own pocket knife, slapping small chunks onto pieces of bread that are turning soggy with hot sauce. Skeetah makes a sandwich, passes it to me, before making his own. The meat is stringy and hard, tastes of half red spice from the hot sauce, which has turned the bread pink, and half wild animal. I bite and I am eating acorns and leaping with fear to the small dark holes in the heart of old oak trees. The sun had set while Skeetah and I were looking for wood for the grill; the sky burst to color above us, and then the sun sank through the trees so that the color ran out of the sky like water out of a drain and left the sky bleached white to navy to dark. I overloaded on wood for the fire; Skeet had to keep grabbing the squirrel out by its foot, his hand wrapped in his shirt, because he was afraid it would burn. But the fire is large enough that I can see all their faces in the dark.
