Sandwiches I Have Known

1. The Humble Cheese Sandwich

Honestly,  this one I found on the Internet kinda looks too nice.

I feel like I must have learned this from my dad, but a go-to snack of mine in my youth was the simple "cheese sandwich." Just slice off the end of a block of colby cheese (there was always one in the Mollmann fridge) and place on a piece of white bread and fold. Pure joy.

Dad was always trying to convert me to the "mustard sandwich" (a folded piece of white bread with mustard on it, duh), but I can't say this one ever really took. I'm also not sure it counts as a sandwich in the strict sense.

2-4. Peanut Butter and Jelly / Peanut Butter and Banana / Peanut Butter and Marshmallow

I assume I must have attempted banana and marshmallow.

When you're a packer in grade school, there's only so much your mother can or should do. As far I as I remembered, I ate a peanut butter and something sandwich every day of my grades 1-8 life. All that could or would change was the topping. Carefully controlled variety, an ethos that lives with me to this day.

Packing got me into trouble, though. When I was in the first grade, the rule at lunchtime at St. John the Baptist School was that everyone was seated in the order they arrived in the cafeteria. You didn't get to pick where you sat, you just arrived and were placed in the next available seat. Plus, we were lined up alphabetically before leaving the classroom, so you didn't even control your place in line. (The disadvantage of having an "M" last name is that even on days where the teacher realized she was giving those children lucky enough to be born with the last name of Baum a consistent unfair advantage and reversed the whole line, you were still dead in the middle.) But most students, upon arriving in the cafeteria, had to go through the line to get their food. Since I packed, I skipped over this-- and thus ended up seating amongst the second graders, who had already gone through the food line.

The second graders were nasty customers, able to use their advanced size and intelligence against my naïveté. One time they manipulated me into sticking a bottle of mustard up my nose. Another time, I told a no doubt amusing anecdote about my kid sister, who at the tender age of one, refused to eat meat. (This was before the long phase of her life where she only ate chicken nuggets, clearly.) She was a vegetarian, I explained. So, asked the second graders with malevolent grins, is your sister a virgin? Not really clear on the difference between the words vegetarian and virgin at the age of six, I answered in the affirmative so as to avoid looking ignorant. They thought this was quite amusing. I couldn't tell why.

All I really wanted to do was eat my peanut butter and something sandwich in peace. Thankfully, the next year, the lunch table policies were revised, and we were segregated by grade. So from then on, only my own classmates could prey on my naïveté. 

5. Peanut Butter and Pickle

There are a surprising number of hits on Google Image Search.

Once in middle school, I reasoned that if peanut butter went with so many other good things, it ought to go with pickles, too.

I don't recommend it, but I don't really discommend it either. You know that there are combinations of flavors that are so aptly described with the phrase "two great tastes that taste great together"? Chocolate and peanut butter, spinach and artichoke, kielbasa and sauerkraut, pineapple and ham. And then there are things that should never be mixed, like cheese and chocolate, strawberries and mustard, peanut butter and sausage. Well, peanut butter and pickles just don't even exist on the same dimensional plane to one another. The flavor combination is just there, inspiring neither like nor dislike. It simply is, like a Zen koan, and defies our attempts to understand it.

6-10. Arby's Five for Five

We were a family of five growing up, and so Arby's Five for Five deal, five roast beef sandwiches for $5, was a recurring favorite. Whenever the deal rotated in, the Mollmanns would be off to Arby's for one roast beef sandwich apiece, and some sides of curly fries. (And if you know the Mollmanns, you know we did not eat out much.) I still favor the humble Arby's roast beef sandwiches; no matter what weird things they put on their menu, I know that this will be the best fast food for any road trip. Obviously you get the cheese sauce and the Arby's sauce; anything else is unnecessary.

That said, like I mentioned, my kid sister had a limited palate, and this continued her entire childhood. She didn't even eat sandwiches at all until college. So when we got Arby's Five for Five, who was eating the fifth sandwich...?

11. Cold Scott

The Internet barely even remembers Scott Dining Hall now.

In my college years, I worked at Scott Dining Hall at Miami University. Scott was sort of a weirdly laid out place; it had two halves with the kitchen in the middle. Employees could go from one side to the other, but not customers. These two halves were known officially as "Ovations!" and "Encore Emporium" (you can bet your butt that I was assiduous about writing that exclamation point), but colloquially they were called "Hot Scott" and "Cold Scott." Hot Scott was the side with the woks and the pizza oven (it really did roast over there), while Cold Scott was the deli, the burgers, the salad bar, and the espresso bar.

The deli served three different kinds of sandwiches: normal sandwiches on bread, bagel sandwiches, and wraps. (The best, by the way, was turkey and cheese on rye with mayo, tomato, lettuce, red onion, and pickle.) I worked as cashier often, and depending on how competently the sandwich had been wrapped, it wasn't always possible to discern whether it was on bread or a bagel. So I would usually ask, "Is that a bagel sandwich or a sandwich sandwich?" People often looked at me a little weird when I did this, but I feel like repeating a word is a perfectly good clarifier (sometimes I distinguish between my students' short papers and my students' paper papers), and that a sandwich on bread is the ur form of the sandwich seems pretty obvious.

12. Hot Scott

I had to get these images off Google Street View.

The real action was on the other side of Scott Dining Hall, though, where there were the woks, and the pizza/sub oven. We did personal pan pizzas and toasted subs, and that was our most popular station by far. At lunch it was usually nuts, and staffing required one person on register, three people putting stuff into the oven, and two people taking out. More importantly, you needed to be organized and on top of things to work the oven side. Once I ascended to the vaunted position of student manager, I ended up working the oven side of Hot Scott at lunch Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for like two years.

You pretty much ended up seeing the same people every week, and some people are very reliable, always wanting the exact same thing on their sub or pizza once it comes out of the oven. I prided myself on my ability to remember exactly what these people wanted, putting it on their sub without them telling me, and calling their name once it was done. Among these was the legendary Garlic Salt Girl, who only ever wanted a sprinkling of garlic salt. There was like... a thing that evolved between me and her. I guess you would call it a flirtation? The full-time employee who worked the oven alongside me most days kept egging me on, but nothing ever happened.... except that on her birthday, her friends came early and gave me a card to give to her along with her order.

There was a lot of giggling.

Hot Scott played a much more significant role in my love life shortly thereafter, though, once I started dating Hayley. One time she came in and I made her my invention, the chicken cordon bleu calzone. Calzones weren't on the menu, but sometimes employees would make them for themselves using pizza dough. This one required liberating chicken fingers from a line over in Cold Scott, actually.

I'm told it was delicious. Hayley still tells this story, which is that she was eating it and someone else asked her what it was. I like to imagine Hayley was really snide as she replied, "I'm sorry, my boyfriend made this for me, and he's a manager here."

(Have I gotten off track? Is a calzone a sandwich?)

13. Reubens 

This actually is the Rein's one.

When I was in college, I would occasionally go to a bar called Steinkeller's, a German place. This was probably the first bar I ever enjoyed going to, and I discovered I liked three things there: stouts, fried calamari, and Reubens. Even though I'm German-American and so is the Reuben, I'd never had one before; the Mollmanns are pretty poor German-Americans in that they don't like sauerkraut. But obviously the Reuben is delicious.

When I moved to Connecticut, though, I began to fear that the good Reuben had forsaken me. At restaurant after restaurant-- restaurants that made otherwise dependable food!-- I would order a Reuben and be utterly disappointed.

Finally I found a good one; an Irish pub opened in my town, and their Irish Reuben turned out to be a thing of delight, the only good Reuben I'd ever encountered in Connecticut.

The weird thing is, though, that Connecticut is home to one of the best Jewish delis there is (supposedly, as I can't say I've been to a lot of Jewish delis), Rein's. But I don't think I ever actually got a Reuben there. I'm sure it would have been delicious. That place did have, though, the greatest pickles of all time, introducing me to the half-sour. A type of pickle sadly in short supply here in Florida, as far as I can tell.

14. The Perfect Grilled Cheese

In her semiautobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson compares the construction of identity to the construction of sandwiches, saying that she goes through life accumulating stories:

I can put these accounts together, and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own.
     The salt beef of civilisation rumbling around in the gut. Constipation was a great problem after the Second World War. Not enough roughage in the diet, too much refined food. If you always eat out you can never be sure what's going in, and received information is nobody's exercise.
     Rotten and rotting.
     Here is some advice: If you want to keep your own teeth, make your own sandwiches.... (95)

My preferred self-made sandwich is simple. People say the key to a perfect grilled cheese is mayo, but people are nuts. (I tried it; there's nothing wrong with it, but it doesn't do anything butter doesn't.) The thing to keep in mind is that cheese has a high specific heat, so if you cook your grilled cheese too high, the bread will cook but the cheese won't have melted yet. Low and slow is how you do it. Set the stove at like 2 or 3, and do the crossword puzzle while you wait. All the perfect grilled cheese needs is patience.

15. The Monte Cristo

When I was a neophyte in graduate school, I was forcibly befriended by one Andrew Grubb. One of his favorite things to do was call me and tell me we were going to the Vernon Diner, a 24/7 diner about five minutes from my apartment.

It was there that I had my first contact with the Monte Cristo, a ham-turkey-and-cheese sandwich served on pieces of French toast. He ordered it the first time I went there with him; the waitress asked, Do you want maple syrup on the side? You bet he did. The next time we went I had to have it. It's delectable, the perfect combination of savory and sweet. When we still lived in Connecticut, my wife claimed that the Vernon Diner was my favorite restaurant. I don't know if that's true, but they definitely served my favorite sandwich.

I went back the first time in a long while for a celebratory dinner post-defense, and discovered that the Monte Cristo wasn't on the the menu. My world shook. Thankfully, the waitress said they could make me one anyway. I just checked the menu on-line; the public outrage must have been too much because it's back on it. Some things have to change (it has been eight years since Andrew Grubb called me on a Saturday night asking if wanted a Monte Cristo with waffle fries), but some things ought not to.

16. The Dagwood

If only, UConn. If only.

At UConn, I became an aficionado of the premade sandwiches served in the school cafés. The best was the Dagwood: salami, ham, pepperoni, turkey on rye. Like a lot of things I like, it involves a lot of flavors all at once. The name comes from the comic strip Blondie (1930-present), where the main character Dagwood has a propensity for giant sandwiches. The weird thing is that there is actually a restaurant chain called Blondie's that sells Dagwoods. What's weird about it is that this chain doesn't date to 1956 like you might expect, but 2005. Like, who in 2005 thought the ossified staple of the newspaper comic page Blondie was the thing to anchor one's restaurant chain on, some fifty years after it ceased to have any cultural relevance? Or were they marketing exclusively to sixty-year-olds? Apparently, some of the franchisees sued the franchise for fraud, claiming they misrepresented the Blondie's brand, but I'd say that if you thought the Blondie brand was worth the $346,000 investment it cost to open a new store, the only person defrauding you was you.

17. Crusty Grilled Cheese

I couldn't find any pictures that looked quite right, tbh.

My grilled cheese sandwich is perfect, but I do occasionally bypass it and make this recipe I found somewhere on the Internet:

INGREDIENTS
¼ cup Parmesan cheese, shredded
3 tbsp. butter, softened
1 dash garlic powder
good bread (little, like a baguette)
good sliced cheese
sliced deli ham
tomatoes
fresh basil

DIRECTIONS
1. mix Parmesan, softened butter, and garlic powder
2. build sandwiches: 1 slice of cheese per sandwich, 1 slice of ham, 1 slice of tomato, 1 basil leaf
3. butter outside and cook on medium heat

You get an amazing crust. Two of those with a bowl of tomato soup is an excellent meal.

One time I made these; a couple days later I had an idea. I made some scrambled eggs, and then put the eggs and a slice of cheese between two slices of rye bread, which I slathered with the leftover butter mixture. The crusty grilled egg and cheese sandwich was delicious. A couple hours later I was in excruciating pain, convinced I was either allergic to eggs or experiencing a heart attack. Hayley rushed me to the emergency room, and that's when we discovered that I had gallstones, and would have to lay off the fat, since eating fat causes the gallbladder to deflate as it releases bile, making it easier for a gallstone to block the bile duct.

Risk factors for gallstones are known as the four F's: fat, female, family, and forty. I used to tell people that one out of four wasn't bad, but then-- several months after this whole saga-- my father told me that all of his sisters and his mothers had had gallstones too.

This was a Sunday. By Tuesday, when I taught, I was still sore. I told my students the reason I was less animated than usual was because of this experience.

Was it worth it? they asked. Was the sandwich that good?

No, I said. No sandwich was that good.

18. Tofu Banh Mi 

Actually, it was pretty good.

Surgery was a possibility for me-- remove the gallbadder, remove the problem-- but it was also possible to moderate my diet. Since the surgery would wipe out a week, I opted to postpone it at least until the semester was over, and I ate low-fat. Lots of turkey, lots of rice, lots of broth, lots of Greek yoghurt. It was pretty delightful. I did lose weight, which was the first thing my mother commented on when she next saw me.

Things were fine. Occasionally, I thought I felt pain coming on and downed a vicodin, but nothing really seemed to happen.

One weekend I went to the local juicery (Willimantic, Connecticut, has inexplicably sustained an artisinal juice place for almost three years now, and it's not just an artisinal juice place, but the kind of place that calls sandwiches "handholds" for some reason) to catch up on grading, and I ordered a coffee and a tofu banh mi. A couple hours later, I began to experience pain. I hightailed it out of there and went home and lay down. I took my vicodin, and tried homespun Internet remedies like apple cider vinegar. (That was disgusting.) Nothing worked and it kept getting worse. I needed a heating pad, but it was August in Connecticut in an apartment without air conditioning, so who the hell wanted to use a heating pad? And Hayley was across the country in Ohio, and she had the car. I called her to complain, and she ended up calling a friend to come and get me and take me to the hospital.

I complained to the doctor that I had been eating low fat, not cheating at all, and that it was a tofu banh mi that had done me in. It wasn't fair! He agreed it wasn't fair. I signed up for the surgery.

What I later discovered is that if you have gallstones, you should also avoid coffee. Coffee reduces the risk of gallstones but it also causes contraction of the gallbladder. (This is the same reason coffee makes you poop.) But of course in the in-and-out minimum-assistance-possible routine of the ER, no one ever told me this. It would have been nice to know. I don't know if I could have done without coffee, but at least I could have been making an informed decision.

Even though I know it wasn't the banh mi's fault, whenever I see one on a menu, I can't quite bring myself to order it.