Gryphon's Aeire Food Fact - Strange Sandwiches

True confessions: Readers share their sandwich secrets 

Thirteen-year-old Ashton Broquet created the combination of toasted 
white bread, reheated macaroni and cheese, crisp bacon slices and 
ketchup.

True confessions: Readers share their sandwich secrets

February 16, 2000

BY SYLVIA RECTOR
DETROIT FREE PRESS FOOD WRITER

Chances are, you are not alone, no matter how weird your secret 
sandwich sounds. Lots of peanut-butter-and-pickle fans who wrote us 
said they'd never met anyone else who liked the same sandwich they 
did. But as it turns out, there are nearly enough of them to support 
a fast-food chain. And it's the same with many others.

Perhaps you've had some of these:

"Leftover spaghetti, cold, on white bread. Best eaten for breakfast 
before anyone gets up." -- Joan Sheridan, Dearborn Heights.

Sliced radish and onions and mayo on toast. -- Larry Dugal, Tecumseh, Ontario.

Scrambled eggs and dill pickle on Polish bakery rye. -- Susan 
Schultz, Dearborn.

Heat Bush's brand baked beans, mix with ketchup and Miracle Whip, eat 
with crisp lettuce on buttered white bread. "My family thinks I am 
certifiable." -- JoAnne Beyrle, Norton Shores.

Chunky steak fries with salt, vinegar and condiment of choice -- 
ketchup, A.1., etc. -- on buttered white bread. -- Bobby Swinney, 
Sterling Heights, formerly of London, England.

Fried bologna and pineapple on a bun, "really delicious." -- Virginia 
Shigley, Lapeer.

Pineapple rings and Miracle Whip. -- Jim Menerick, Spring Lake.

"A favorite of Dad's is a cucumber, onion, butter, salt, pepper and 
vinegar sandwich!" -- Erik Kidder, Canton.

Sliced green peppers fried in vegetable oil, salted, in white or 
wheat bread. "Delicious!" -- Louise Chafin, Ferndale.

Peanut butter with onion. "I have never heard of anyone else with 
this craving. Can you imagine?" -- Judi Duncan Yantiss, Royal Oak.

"Peanut butter with cold, leftover creamed corn. To me it is the 
BEST." -- Ray Todoroff, Garden City.

"Grilled cheese with grape jelly spread on top." -- Robert A. White, Livonia.

"Tuna salad, cream cheese, lettuce and tomato on pumpernickel. YUM 
YUM." -- Debby Gibbons, Eastpointe.

Ham on raisin bread, cheese optional. -- Betty Winter, Southfield.

Italian bread spread thickly with sour cream and lots of sugar. 
"Delicious!" -- Anni Richardson, Garden City.

"My favorite childhood sandwich was Limburger cheese and sliced 
onions on rye -- a good Catholic girl's birth control. Ha ha!" -- 
Nell Rivard, St. Clair Shores.

Blue cheese and sliced radishes on toasted bread. -- Elizabeth Deeds, Berkley.

Grilled cheese with oregano and tomato. -- Donna Lynch, Clinton Township.

Cottage cheese and apple butter spread on Grandma's homemade bread, 
served open-faced. "I thought everybody's grandmother gave them this 
treat." -- Carol Bowen, Jackson.

Cream cheese and coarsely crushed barbecue-flavor potato chips. -- 
Sandra Caster, Walled Lake.

Hot pepper cheese with orange marmalade on raisin bread. -- Dora 
Pappas, Farmington Hills.

"Best sandwich going is peanut butter and bacon ...Yum Yum." -- James 
DeLand, Berkley.

Fried chicken livers and fried egg on toast with ketchup and black 
pepper. -- Douglas Heberger, Westland.

Fried green tomato and onion with Hellmann's on whole wheat, "a 
unique Southern sandwich." -- Sandy Mostrog, Farmington Hills.

Fried bologna and fried egg, sunny-side-up, yolk unbroken, with 
Miracle Whip and mustard on two slices of white bread. "Eat it with 
the yolk running between your fingers. Yummy!" -- Mary Ann Geha, 
Lincoln Park.

"Try blueberry preserves with Cheez Whiz. Good for kids; grown-ups 
prefer a better grade of cheese." -- James Stevens, Detroit.

Two slices of warm buttered toast encasing fresh orange slices 
sprinkled with a little sugar, for breakfast. -- Vivian Oberholtzer, 
Comstock Park.

"Strawberry jelly on white bread with a slice of American cheese 
...Only my baby-sitter and I appreciate the great taste." -- Jennifer 
Bence, age 12, Canton.

Cold Northern beans on bread with lots of pepper. -- Judy 
Dobberstein, Muskegon.

Bread, butter and Hershey's syrup; as kids in the U.P. "We really did 
enjoy those sandwiches." -- Larry and Vick Underhill, Norway, Mich.

"My Grandma Jane likes sardines with lemon juice on toast with lots 
of butter. I like peanut butter and honey on white bread, and my dad 
thinks that's really weird." -- Lindsay Bohn.

"The sandwich that tops it all is the one my nephew, Michael 
Eschenburg, usually had when he came home from school: a bread 
sandwich. A slice of white bread between two slices of white bread. 
Now that's strange." -- Joann Eschenburg, Clinton Township.


'Wich craft

Readers will put almost anything between two slices of bread

February 16, 2000

BY SYLVIA RECTOR
FREE PRESS FOOD WRITER

So much for culinary trends. When it comes to food, what really gets 
people going is a great sandwich -- an indulgent, down-to-earth, 
secret pleasure of a meal.

Something sublime, like peanut butter and onion. Or bologna and 
cottage cheese. Even sliced olives and Miracle Whip.

RELATED CONTENT

* True confessions: Readers share their sandwich secrets

After the Free Press invited readers last month to tell us about 
their secret sandwiches -- ones they adore but don't discuss for fear 
of ridicule -- sandwich-lovers swamped us with frightful, hilarious 
and weirdly tempting combos.

"Chocolate pudding on wheat or white," says Mary Pierce of Holland.

"Potato chips about two inches thick" between two slices of buttered, 
good-quality rye, says Jan Poff of White Lake.

"Bean sandwiches are marvelous," claims Jinny Bartkus of Plymouth.

But the big news was the legion of folks who told of lifelong love 
affairs with peanut butter and pickle sandwiches -- mostly dill, 
followed by sweet pickle and pickle relish. By a landslide, PB&P was 
the most common "uncommon" filling mentioned in the 300-plus letters 
we received.

Before turning up your nose at any of these combinations, however, 
perhaps you should taste them.

That, to everyone's genuine surprise, was the conclusion we reached 
after inviting eight readers to share their sandwiches in a brown-bag 
lunch in the Free Press Test Kitchen last week. The gathering was the 
culmination of the Campaign Against Sandwichism, our tongue-in-cheek 
effort to end prejudice against the millions of Americans who like 
unlikely stuff between two slices of bread.

Here are our guests, their secret sandwiches and the panel's vote 
after tasting all eight combos:

* Ann Jordan, 65, a retired dental hygienist from Novi, brought 
peanut butter, dill pickle, lettuce and Miracle Whip on whole wheat, 
a sandwich that combined the best of two major demographic groups: 
PB-and-pickle and PB-and-lettuce.

The crisp lettuce and crunchy pickle helped offset the sticky-smooth 
texture of the peanut butter and Miracle Whip, and gave the sandwich 
a tart, fresh taste.

The vote: Jordan's sandwich got a "yes" from six of the other seven tasters.

* Lyn Johnson, 48, of Canton Township, a marketing specialist with 
Mitsui trading company of Southfield, was asked to bring what she 
called "just your basic peanut butter and mayonnaise." Her letter 
listed at least 10 combinations using peanut butter, the overwhelming 
favorite sandwich ingredient.

The best PB-and-mayo is made with Hellmann's and crunchy Jif, Johnson 
says, "and you have to put gobs of both on the bread, so that dollops 
come out the side."

The vote: Four of the seven other panelists voted "yes" on this sandwich.

* Ashton Broquet, 13, of Garden City is an eighth-grader at St. 
Raphael Catholic School, where students in teacher Fred Abel's 
science class discussed sandwiches as part of a nutrition unit. Her 
sandwich is made with toasted white bread, reheated macaroni and 
cheese, crisp bacon slices and a colorful dab of ketchup. She 
invented it for breakfast one morning when she wasn't in the mood for 
the bacon and eggs her mother, Cindy Broquet, had prepared.

Dubious at first, most other tasters liked this combination. The 
ketchup added sweetness to the smoky-salty bacon flavor.

The vote: Six big thumbs-up for this one.

* Barry Van Engelen, 50, of Grosse Ile, yardmaster for CN North 
American Railroad in Dearborn, rounded out the panel's peanut butter 
contingent with peanut butter and tomato. He was the first of more 
than a dozen people who wrote after this reporter confessed that PB&T 
was her own secret sandwich from childhood.

Van Engelen first had the sandwich as a boy, when someone's mom 
served it to him and other ravenous kids at the end of a daylong 
Metropark outing. He recommends using good whole-wheat bread, 
Smucker's natural crunchy peanut butter, ripe garden tomatoes and a 
little salt and pepper. Yum.

The vote: Three of the other seven panelists voted "yes" on this one.

* Crystal Mitchell, 43, of Detroit, a teacher at East Catholic High 
School in Detroit, looks forward to holidays so she can have mustard 
potato salad, cold turkey dressing and cranberry sauce on wheat. 
Mitchell says she doesn't cook, so at family dinners, "I'm the one 
who always brings the paper goods and cleans up." She makes her 
sandwich after others are in bed, out of respect for her mother's 
hard work preparing a nice meal.

Mitchell was one of several readers who wrote to praise leftover 
stuffing sandwiches; most panelists were surprised at how much they 
liked bread-in-bread.

The vote: "Yes," said five of seven panelists.

* Candice Berry, 28, of Detroit, an administrative assistant at Urban 
Science marketing company in the Renaissance Center, enjoys bologna, 
mayo and cottage cheese. A handful of other readers' letters also 
advocated cottage cheese sandwiches.

She was a little girl when she first substituted it for American 
cheese with bologna and mayo. "I thought, cheese is cheese," she 
recalls. She uses small-curd cottage cheese and Wonder bread. "You 
have to press the edges of the bread together so the cottage cheese 
won't squirt out."

Panelists liked the saltiness of the bologna with the mild tang of 
the cottage cheese.

The vote: Six "yes" votes for Berry's unusual combo.

* Rich Merrill, 45, of Saline, a staff software engineer for Unisys 
Corp., grew up eating banana and Miracle Whip sandwiches prepared by 
his mom. In college, his girlfriend -- now his wife -- thought it was 
horrendous. But he felt vindicated when they found out that their 
Ohio State University student cafeteria had a bowl of Miracle Whip 
and sliced bananas on the salad bar every day.

He recommends using lots of mayo in the sandwich, explaining, "It's a 
gob thing."

The vote: Three "yes" votes for bananas and Miracle Whip.

* Delores Kanikowski, 69, of Harrison Township, a retired office 
worker, hesitated to bring her sandwich because it was so simple: a 
slice of Italian bread wrapped around a chocolate bar. Kanikowski's 
mom loved chocolate and used to bring home chunks of it from the 
candy factory where she worked, when a big bar fell and was damaged.

Numerous readers said they used sweets -- from chocolate to brown 
sugar to Karo syrup -- in sandwiches. Kanikowski says hearty Italian 
bread and good-quality milk chocolate are best.

The vote: Four of the other seven panelists endorsed the chocolate sandwich.

To join these courageous metro Detroiters in the fight against 
Sandwichism, try one of their yummy concoctions.

Or invent a completely new one -- if that's possible.


Displayed on: Thursday - 24 May 12 - 05:36:39