Frosted Sandwich Loaf!!!

My mother’s voice dropped.

“What the hell kind of food is that supposed to be,” she said. She wasn’t referring to the sandwich loaf pictured above; we were looking through old cookbooks. The main item filling the pot in the photo in the cookbook was obvious: glistening brown beans, possibly canned pork ‘n’ beans. But its ring of garnish was not: five slices of what looked like raw meatloaf, with slits cut on one side to petal them into crowns.

I searched the cookbook for a caption and found none.  Quickly my mother regained her bearings. “Oh, honey, that’s Spam! Spam! We used to eat that all the time. You know what Spam is, don’t you?”

My father shuffled through the kitchen in his workout clothes, getting ready for his nightly NordicTrak 5k. “Mmmm,” he said. “Spiced pork and ham.”

After two nights at my parents’ Wisconsin home, my casual perusal of my mom’s thick vintage cookbooks, printed at the advent of cheap processed foods, had found a purpose. I was going to a friend’s house for a dinner party, and I’d decided to bring an appetizer.

I gathered from these cookbooks’ evidence that in the years immediately following World War II, American cuisine occupied a liminal space. It lived in a borderland between farm and manufacture, Old World and the future. Here, veal knuckles and souse – pickled pig’s heads – lived just pages from modern condiment mish-mashes – peanut butter, mayonnaise, chopped Bermuda onions, whipped and on a sandwich. Here, cosmopolitan party dishes married form and function, food and garnish – eggs stuffed with sardine paste or asparagus puree.

“Why don’t you bring an aspic?” my mom asked me, looking over my shoulder. “Eggs in aspic?”

She didn’t have an aspic mold, however. Instead, I chose to make a frosted sandwich loaf! In Square Foods, a stupendous compendium of recipes lost to a not-so-distant culinary past, Jane and Michael Stern describe sandwich loaves as belonging to the “trompe l’oeil school of gastronomy: a club sandwich with delusions of grandeur, impersonating a layer cake.”

The recipe for sandwich loaf is simple enough, so I won’t get too specific. You can find a nice recipe here, though, or follow my loaf step by step on Flickr. Basically, you:

1. Cut the crusts off a loaf of day-old bread.

2. Cut the loaf of bread in four horizontal slices

3. Layer each slice (except the top) with mayonnaise-based fillings: egg salad, ham salad, chicken salad, salmon salad. If you choose to use vegetables instead (iceberg lettuce, tomato), be sure to spread the bread with mayonnaise also.

4. Chill. Frost with softened cream cheese. Garnish as desired. Suggestions: olives, parsley, radish rosettes.

In the end, my sandwich loaf made an impression at the party: two of the guests over sixty whispered in my ear, “It was actually good.” My mom and I thought the sandwich loaf might be plausibly revived  to suit twenty-first century tastes, using whole grain bread with chi-chi fillings like hummus and tapenade.

I am concluding with a recipe, however, that bears little hope for revision:

SAUERKRAUT JUICE COCKTAIL
from The United States Regional Cook Book, edited by Ruth Berolzheimer, Book Production Industries, Inc., 1947

2 cups sauerkraut juice
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/2 cup finely-diced fresh apple

Combine ingredients in the order listed. Serv cold in cocktail glasses. Makes 6 portions.

“I hate to think I know more than God,” my mother said, “but I don’t think that drink they gave Jesus on the cross was as bad as sauerkraut cocktail.”

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