The Lunch Encounter

Archived Episodes

Thousands and thousands of years ago as our ancestors wandered about the savannahs of Africa hunting and gathering and no one ever packed a lunch. Some archeologists have found traces of what they believe to be crude lunch pails and thermoses, but neither of these discoveries can outweigh the fact that they had no bread….without bread, no sandwiches. Had our Neanderthal grandparents known what they were missing, no doubt tears would have streamed down their prominent brows (if they were upside down) for sorrow at the lack of sandwiches in the Paleolithic era….DENIED the pleasure of a mammoth lettuce and tomato on wheat….DENIED a savory ibex salad sandwich on rye….DENIED a megacerosburger (California style with avocado). It was not until the emergence of Homo-sapiens that sandwiches began to flourish and the sandwich-less Neanderthals disappeared.
Professor Frederic Von Hustiebird

You got your animal, you got your vegetable, you got your mineral.
Skinny, juice-squirting Hebrew Nationals, homegrown spuds what had to be scrubbed, Grandma Rubin’s dills from the teetering pickle shelf in the dungeon. The mineral? Salt of course.

This meal speaks to me primally, must be the Russian-ness of it. My ancestor’s remains whispering to me from garden soil. Say you are living in the Moscow environs, haven’t seen daylight in months cause it is February and are committed to the “eat locally” creed. Wheat for bread? No way. The three P’s, Pork, Potatoes and Pickles? Yes way.

Salt. Could salt be considered local? Me thinks not.

Since at least the 1930s Beerntsen’s has been a landmark on the main street of Manitowoc, WI, a small city on Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline. Generations of high school students have consumed sundaes and sandwiches in its booths and people of all ages stop by to purchase its delicious specialty chocolates and other candies. My most vivid memories are of the early 1940s when one of my favorites was the olive-nut sandwiches that still are listed on the menu almost 65 years later. After three generations of ownership by the Beerntsen family, a longtime employee now owns the shop but, to me, the sandwiches, chocolates, mint patties, and profusion of sundaes appear just the same as ever, and I am transported back to when it all was such a source of delight.
My mom

It’s been around for 65 years or so and apparently has never changed. The decor — it’s visible in the one photo — is dark wood booths, tile floor, and glass candy cases and is in beautiful shape. The menu may not have ever changed either. Pineapple figures prominently in many of the sundaes; I’m not sure why. I bought some “fairy food,” a favorite of Mother’s from when she worked there, and served it to some friends, all guys. (I didn’t tell them the name.) One of them, who has spent time in Buffalo, said, “Oh, sponge candy!” When I did mention the name, another of the guys said, “Now you tell us!” It looks like hard foam rubber covered in chocolate. The prices, while they aren’t original, still are pretty low. The sandwich was about $3 and my turtle sundae (with hot fudge on the side so it would stay hot) was about $4.
My sister, Mara

The sandwich surveyors out in the field cannot be expected to eat and shoot. Eat, shoot and leave, she did, but without reviewing the images. Dang that flash. This olive nut doesn’t know what hit it. Still, you can see a bit of the tasty, salty paste blopping out on the left.

I did a little browsing around on the dubbyou-dubbyou-dubbyou and found a surprising number of recipes for olive-nut sandwiches. Who on earth is making them? And why do the recipes all call for sliced olives? Finely chopped seems the way to go. Put the olives and nuts down on a board and run across them and back a few times with a chef’s knife. Soon olives won’t know themselves from nuts and vice versa.

Here is a representative sample:

Olive-Nut Sandwich

Let cream cheese stand at room temperature until soft. Mash with a
fork and add mayonnaise. Add chopped pecans, olives, olive juice and
pepper. Stir well. This will be mushy. Refrigerate in pint jar for at
least 24 -48 hours. It will then become thick. (Believe it or not.)
You will have nearly a pint of delectable spread! It’s best served on
very thin toast or fresh, thinly sliced bread will do. A little
lettuce is a good touch, and cutting into finger tip sizes completes
the feeling of first class.

Servings: 4 servings

Maybe the olives mash to bits when they are mixed hard with nuts, the nuts acting as tiny millstones. Love this unpretentious recipe with its enthusiastic “You will have nearly a pint of delectable spread!” Don’t know what’s meant by “1 bread” and “1 lettuce”, although I can imagine sitting down with 1 loaf, 1 head, 1 batch, 1 knife, 1 salt craving and scarfing the lot. In the middle of the night. Palm size, rather than finger tip. First class, alright.

As my nephew exclaimed, it’s the Weenie Beanie, not the Beanie Weenie, which comes in a can. The former is a beloved Arlington, Virginia drive-in. Pull up and loiter.

Liverwurst, Eggsalad, Hamsalad or Olive Nut Sandwich Platter

Damn, damn, damn, those Sterns beat me to the punch again. In fact, they downed the last drop from the bowl. Well, nah, they probably have plenty of other fun road food tricks up their sleeves, their rolled-up-let’s-dig-in sleeves. Damn, I wanted to drive around the country eating sandwiches and telling all us poor old house-‘n-job-bound drones about it.

Roadfood Sandwiches: Recipes and Lore from Our Favorite Shops Coast to Coast, the new book by Jane and Michael Stern, is out and can be yours for about 15 bucks. Think I’ll take my 15 clams and invest in myself via caloric intake, aka a coupla crabcake sandwiches. Truth be told, I wouldn’t mind reading about the Hot Brown, but no way am I going to make one myself. If it ain’t in Louisville, no thank you. This book is one x-acto knife away from finding a space on my shelf. Recipes be gone! Please pass the map.

Nothing to do with sandwiches, but I sure do love that shade of blue. And the trays they have at the Viking is are v cool, speckled and stiff like melamine. This is a classic Door County fish boil dinner and you haven’t lived till you’ve eaten one. That’s a little strong. Let me put it this way. If you have a thing for puddles of melted butter, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to a fish boil.

This is how they do it. This is called the boil off. It involves kerosene.

These particular pies were evocative in the case and that was enough. In every other quality they left something essential to be desired. We packed them up between two ridged-edge, floppity, summertime paper plates and carried them home, optimistic that they would taste good once our appetites waxed. Along the way they were flattened, compressed, reduced. Maybe they were sat upon, or gripped firmly, and so they took up very little space in the garbage bag.

Last week Teddy and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Memorial Union Terrace in Madison, Wisconsin – not strictly annual because we missed last year – for brats and ice cream. Double-dipped it since we were one year remiss.

I had the pleasure of peeling Teddy’s brat. Huh?! A first for me, even after a coon’s age of cooking. He claimed it tasted like wine (!) and I was not about to deep six it. Nope, not a perfectly good Wisconsin bratwurst, cooked outdoors and served in a paper boat. I braved the heavy coating of ketchup and stripped that sausage clean. Ack. He ate it. I did not watch. Grandma was kind enough not to comment as I can only imagine her horror. Bad enough that her grandchild was permitted to squirt sweet red stuff abundantly over bun and brat. Insult to injury, any shred of brat dignity was peeled away and plopped in the rubbish. Poor ugly sausage, it did not taste like wine.

For a couple more pictures and a link to a Terrace site click here.

read the menu board.

Is that a command or an offering?

My perch perched at PC Junction in Door County, Wisconsin, where your lunch basket perches on a model flatcar and is delivered via rail.
You can take a look at more pictures here and see a video too. It’s dumb, but fun.

The previous mayonnaise post generated comments that cannot be ignored.

It’s true. Jews have a hate-hate relationship with mayo.
JAF

And to reiterate – with good reason (see below):
I’m pro mayo all the way, baby. It makes the tomato sandwich what it is (open face slice of white bread, mayo, slice of tomato large enough to cover the bread, salt & pepper). Maybe it’s the hint of sweetness it adds, or maybe it’s simply because mayo is such a guilty pleasure–nothing good can come of it health-wise, I’m quite sure. It’s also THE single most important sandwich lubricant. You can’t have a ham sandwich on dry bread, and to me, mustard without mayo is too sharp (again that sweetness). So I like them together.

The only exception to the mustard-mayo combo is Durkee’s, a spread that kind of takes the place of both. But it’s hard to find outside the South.
Linda Kulman

After reading the Mayo? Yay-oh or Nay-oh Linda adds:
And…I’m Jewish!

An important point that was neglected:
I like a bit (of mayo) in certain situations. Wouldn’t want a sandwich to fall apart, now would I?
K Groom

And from the nayo camp Cynthia Olson has a tale:
Too much mayonnaise is a terrible thing. Once, when I had a bit of a hangover, I was at a restaurant eating a hamburger. The bun was kind of dry so I asked for a “little bit” of mayonnaise. The waitress brought out a SOUP BOWL full of mayo. I had to put a napkin over it so that I didn’t have to look at it because just the sight was enough to make me hurl. What was she thinking?!!! My friends laugh about “the mayonnaise incident” to this day.

As for me…
Growing up my mother always spread both pieces of bread with some butter – granted, my dad owned a dairy – to keep the bread from getting soggy. The butter also sticks the sandwich together and provides lubrication. Butter tastes good with basically anything. I don’t remember eating much mayonnaise as a child, except IN things such as tuna salad and potato salad. We were a mustard family, perhaps because my father is Jewish and my mother’s father was German. I remember Sunday night sandwiches – thin slices of ham on nice sturdy white bread from my dad’s bakery, butter on the bread, brown mustard too, and crunchy lettuce. It was iceberg, which I still love on a sandwich. It is crunchy and wet. Dill pickles on the side. Also crunchy and wet. Salty too. Always want to snap off a bite of pickle with every bite of sandwich. So, no mayonnaise that I recall.

Later on I learned to make mayonnaise and that is when the lightbulb went off. Homemade mayonnaise is another animal altogether and a feat of culinary prestidigitation.

If you live 7 miles off the paved road you would want lunch to be like Miriam Rubin’s, at least once in a while.
Today we have guests from Chicago. For lunch, outside on the big table under the black walnut tree, we had locally raised and cured thick-sliced bacon, the first fat slabs of my incomparable Brandywine tomatoes, soft, locally grown lettuce, huge slices of toasted firm seeded bread, a chiffonade of basil (from the garden), this year’s Grandma Rubin’s Kosher Dills, last years crisp sweet and spicy pickle slices, kosher salt, grainy mustard, and mayo.

What a lunch that was.

I betcha she made that mayo herself, too.