School Sandwiches

LostInTyme · May 28, 2021

Recently I purchased some Cotto Salami (Oscar Meyer) at the grocery. I made sandwiches for Vija and me with the salami, some Kraft orange cheese slices on a hamburger bun with mustard and sweet pickle relish. Vija immediately named them School Sandwiches. This got me to thinking about those days of lunch box lunches (later, brown paper bag lunches)

In the early days, my lunches consisted of a thermos full of white milk, a sandwich, an apple or banana and a pack of Hostess Twinkies. Back then, the Twinkies had a very distinctive banana overtone of flavor. A few years ago, Hostess re-introduced the banana flavor into Twinkies for a short time.

In Junior and senior high schools, the sandwich became baloney and dill pickle with ketchup and mustard on white bread, an apple. I bought milk at school. No more broken thermos bottles. Once in a great while, we would buy some Lawsons chip-chop ham and it showed up in my lunch bag with white bread and mustard. Later, when I made my own lunch for work, the sandwiches were always on rye bread with ham, swiss cheese, and mustard, dill pickle on the side. The drink may have been a coke, in a can, or perhaps some coffee in a thermos bottle that no longer broke if you looked at it cross-eyed.

So, now on to my questions. Is Swiss cheese better with big holes or small holes? And, if you poke holes in bologna, does it become Swiss Bologna? And whatever happened to good 'ole baloney? Is bologna Italian,. or French? What is your favorite condiment? I like most and mix them together for a potpourri of flavors.

Edward · May 28, 2021

Much to my wife's disgust, I've developed a real taste for spam this past year (the dog loves it too, she always gets a slice when we open a tin). Spam with bbq sauce, or pickle. Maybe a pinch of lettuce. Yum.

Or corned beef -

This stuff, not what is called corned beef in the US (which was *never* a traditional dish in Ireland, no matter what some guy selling green beer tries to tell you!).

Prawn cocktail crisps (potato chips) are always a good addition to any sandwich!

I'm also rather fond of a hot sausage roll sandwich.

This is a sausage roll:

Minced pork in pastry. They're meant to be eaten like that, but stick 'em in a slice of soft, white bread and lash on the brown sauce, oh, my! To be consumed when the wife's out or I get in trouble.

LostInTyme · May 28, 2021

They all sound yummy. I've been a sandwich guy my entire life. Stick something on a bun or between a couple slices of most types of bread, add some cheese, lettuce condiments and perhaps a dill or sweet pickle and I'm in pig's heaven.

LizzieMaine · May 28, 2021

All during the eighth grade I went to school with a brown paper bag containing a mustard sandwich and half a lemon, just to be different.

In grade school I enjoyed taking heart-meat sandwiches so if some boy asked me what I was eating I could tell him "a calf's heart" just to see his eyes bug out.

For a beverage, the only allowed choice was a half-pint carton of "Superman" brand white milk that cost seven cents -- you weren't allowed to bring beverages from home. For a while there was a fad for bringing a small plastic prescription bottle full of chocolate powder to give the milk some flavor, but they cracked down on that too. Once or twice a semester, the white milk would be replaced by a half-pint carton of "Superman" brand CHOCOLATE MILK, but we were never allowed to know exactly when this would come. A kid who happened to see the milkman unloading the crates off the truck and glimpsed brown cartons instead of red had information of great value to the playground telegraph.

Frunobulax · May 28, 2021

LostInTyme said:
Recently I purchased some Cotto Salami (Oscar Meyer) at the grocery. I made sandwiches for Vija and me with the salami, some Kraft orange cheese slices on a hamburger bun with mustard and sweet pickle relish. Vija immediately named them School Sandwiches. This got me to thinking about those days of lunch box lunches (later, brown paper bag lunches)

In the early days, my lunches consisted of a thermos full of white milk, a sandwich, an apple or banana and a pack of Hostess Twinkies. Back then, the Twinkies had a very distinctive banana overtone of flavor. A few years ago, Hostess re-introduced the banana flavor into Twinkies for a short time.

In Junior and senior high schools, the sandwich became baloney and dill pickle with ketchup and mustard on white bread, an apple. I bought milk at school. No more broken thermos bottles. Once in a great while, we would buy some Lawsons chip-chop ham and it showed up in my lunch bag with white bread and mustard. Later, when I made my own lunch for work, the sandwiches were always on rye bread with ham, swiss cheese, and mustard, dill pickle on the side. The drink may have been a coke, in a can, or perhaps some coffee in a thermos bottle that no longer broke if you looked at it cross-eyed.

So, now on to my questions. Is Swiss cheese better with big holes or small holes? And, if you poke holes in bologna, does it become Swiss Bologna? And whatever happened to good 'ole baloney? Is bologna Italian,. or French? What is your favorite condiment? I like most and mix them together for a potpourri of flavors.

You went to Lawson's? You must be from Ohio. There was one across the street from my HS. As we had an "open lunch," which meant we were allowed to leave campus and go somewhere else for lunch, a trip to Lawson's, or the nearby Stop-n-Go, were usually on the agenda. I always wanted an Awesome McLawson t-shirt.

My packed lunch, which gave way to the school cafeteria when I got to Junior High, was usually a sandwich and maybe some chips. Much of the time Mom would pack a small Thermos of some sort of nasty canned chili that I loved at the time. It was never hot, of course, as even if it had been placed hot in the Thermos before 7AM lunch was closer to 11AM.

As recently as yesterday, I had a baloney, Kraft single, and Mike-sells potato chip sandwich with mayo. My only nod to a change with that is it is on wheat bread and not Wonder white bread. To top it off, I had leftover Kraft macaroni and cheese with my sandwich. Some things die hard.

LostInTyme · May 28, 2021

Great memories. Yes,I am originally from Ohio. When Lawsons opened, we were fairly poor, and Lawsons sold stuff cheaper than most other grocery stores. We shopped there a lot. When I left Cleveland in 1987, there were still a few Lawsons stores left, but they weren't what I remembered from my younger days.

HudsonHawk · May 30, 2021

I don't remember any particular sandwich from my school boy days...just your run of the mill PB&J and liverwurst. I once had a neighbor named Otto who ate lard sandwiches...just a big slice of cold lard between two pieces of plain, dry bread. And no SPAM for me. I'd rather eat dirt.

As for condiments, I'm a mustard man. I have probably 10-12 different types of mustard on hand at any given time. You might say I'm a bit fanatical about mustard.

LostInTyme · May 30, 2021

I do the same thing with mustards. When I see a new one, I buy it. My wife is always telling me that I already have enough mustards to carry them off in my coffin. I guess she intends to have me "take it with me".

Harp · Jun 8, 2021

Edward said:
Much to my wife's disgust, I've developed a real taste for spam this past year (the dog loves it too, she always gets a slice when we open a tin). Spam with bbq sauce, or pickle. Maybe a pinch of lettuce. Yum.

I've always enjoyed Spam, hot or cold, breakfast, lunch, supper, or night guard duty issue with baked potato.
Why it has a bad rep is ????

LostInTyme · Jun 8, 2021

Spam-a-lot, a Monty Python favorite.

belfastboy · Jun 8, 2021

Edward said:
Much to my wife's disgust, I've developed a real taste for spam this past year (the dog loves it too, she always gets a slice when we open a tin). Spam with bbq sauce, or pickle. Maybe a pinch of lettuce. Yum.

Or corned beef -

This stuff, not what is called corned beef in the US (which was *never* a traditional dish in Ireland, no matter what some guy selling green beer tries to tell you!).

Prawn cocktail crisps (potato chips) are always a good addition to any sandwich!

I'm also rather fond of a hot sausage roll sandwich.

This is a sausage roll:

Minced pork in pastry. They're meant to be eaten like that, but stick 'em in a slice of soft, white bread and lash on the brown sauce, oh, my! To be consumed when the wife's out or I get in trouble.

When I went to university....well lets just say thank God for fried spam on toast.

belfastboy · Jun 8, 2021

In terms of school sandwiches...Without peanut butter and sometimes with jam I would have starved. In elementary school we prepaid for milk that the milkman would deliver everyday in small glass bottles. If I was on good behaviour once in a while my Mom would spring the extra $$ for chocolate milk.

Edward · Jun 9, 2021

Harp said:
I've always enjoyed Spam, hot or cold, breakfast, lunch, supper, or night guard duty issue with baked potato.
Why it has a bad rep is ????

I think in the UK it's because of its associations with being a rationing-era food. Meat was rationed in the UK from 1942, and was among the last few items still on the ration to be lifted in 1954. During that time, Spam was one of the most common meat products people did see; spam fritters remained a common school dinner in the 50s. The generation that grew up on the ration and often looked down on Spam as a result included the Monty Python boys; their 'Spam Sketch' (and the associated song), based on the notion that 'nobody likes spam', both reflected a broader, popular position and to some extent kept it in mind.

Due to its primary source in the UK being imports from the USA during the war, an urban legend developed that it stood for "Supply Processed American Meat", but this is actually what we today would know as a 'backronym' (i.e. the ackronym was later made up to suit what the word had come to mean rather than the word being derived from the initials of several words). Spam is actually a contraction of SPiced hAM. It is a trademark, owned by Hormel Foods in the US since about 1940. In 1996, Hormel sued Jim Henson over the appearance of a pig character called 'Spa'am' in Muppet Treasure Island (Hormel Foods Corp. v. Jim Henson Prods., 73 F.3d 497 (2d Cir. 1996)). A decade later, Eric Idle persuaded them to sponsor, rather than sue, Spamalot the Musical. Notably, they don't objected to the uncapitalised use of 'spam' to describe unwanted email, though this relates back to the Pythons again, the nickname for unsolicited commercial emails being derived from the spam skit, and on the same basis that "nobody likes spam".

Postscript: every year when teaching data protection law to students in Beijing, I explain this. A couple of years ago, one of them approached me the next day and said "I found that /Monty Python sketch online. I have seen it, but I don't understand why it is funny...." The idea of explaining a Python joke struck me as hilarious in an of itself. Eric Idle could probably get quite the song out of it...

LostInTyme said:
Spam-a-lot, a Monty Python favourite.

Some things in life are bad... but Spam ain't one of them!

GHT · Jun 9, 2021

Edward, you are a mine of useless information, it's why your posts make for such an entertaining read. I can even put up with the intrusive adverts for the chuckle I got from your take on Spam.

The luncheon meat in my sandwiches was probably Spam. Cheese sandwiches also had a schoolboy name, we called it, "mousetrap." Probably because Cheddar cheese was the bait on every mousetrap.

School sandwiches were consumed to satisfy hunger rather than to be actually enjoyed. The alternative was the school's cooked meals, not exactly a flavoursome, gastronomic, culinary delight. Who can ever forget either the semolina pudding, or, my stomache feels queezy writing this, the tapioca pudding. The semolina always came with a blob of something disgusting on top, like some cat had disgraced itself. But the tapioca was so gross in appearance that it was, and still is, known as frogspawn.

LostInTyme · Jun 9, 2021

And yet, we all seem to remember, albeit, perhaps not fondly, those lunches constructed and packaged by our Mothers and Wives each day. Most carried them off to school or work, and happily consumed them with relish. It was life, simple, as it were, and we lived it.

LizzieMaine · Jun 9, 2021

My mother, bless her, never made a sandwich for me again once I turned six. When I was going to sub-primary, yes - but once I hit first grade, it was "time to grow up, kid." I also had to make my own breakfast, which is when I learned to heat up fish sticks in the toaster.

I ate a lot of tapioca pudding in my early childhood -- one of the many jobs my father couldn't hold was working as a longshoreman unloading tapioca ships, and he'd come home covered in white dust. I found it hard to believe that this was the same stuff as in the pudding, but I asked for and ate the pudding willingly because I thought I was supporting his job in doing so. Turned out I was more interested in his job than he was, but I did get to where I really liked the pudding. Still do, to the amazement and puzzlement of everyone I know under the age of 50.

Harp · Jun 9, 2021

Edward said:
I think in the UK it's because of its associations with being a rationing-era food. Meat was rationed in the UK from 1942, and was among the last few items still on the ration to be lifted in 1954. During that time, Spam was one of the most common meat products people did see; spam fritters remained a common school dinner in the 50s. The generation that grew up on the ration and often looked down on Spam as a result included the Monty Python boys; their 'Spam Sketch' (and the associated song), based on the notion that 'nobody likes spam', both reflected a broader, popular position and to some extent kept it in mind.

Due to its primary source in the UK being imports from the USA during the war, an urban legend developed that it stood for "Supply Processed American Meat", but this is actually what we today would know as a 'backronym' (i.e. the ackronym was later made up to suit what the word had come to mean rather than the word being derived from the initials of several words). Spam is actually a contraction of SPiced hAM. It is a trademark, owned by Hormel Foods in the US since about 1940. In 1996, Hormel sued Jim Henson over the appearance of a pig character called 'Spa'am' in Muppet Treasure Island (Hormel Foods Corp. v. Jim Henson Prods., 73 F.3d 497 (2d Cir. 1996)). A decade later, Eric Idle persuaded them to sponsor, rather than sue, Spamalot the Musical. Notably, they don't objected to the uncapitalised use of 'spam' to describe unwanted email, though this relates back to the Pythons again, the nickname for unsolicited commercial emails being derived from the spam skit, and on the same basis that "nobody likes spam".

Postscript: every year when teaching data protection law to students in Beijing, I explain this. A couple of years ago, one of them approached me the next day and said "I found that /Monty Python sketch online. I have seen it, but I don't understand why it is funny...." The idea of explaining a Python joke struck me as hilarious in an of itself. Eric Idle could probably get quite the song out of it...

Some things in life are bad... but Spam ain't one of them!

Data protection law to students in Beijing? That is, no pun intended, criminally comic.

Edward · Jun 9, 2021

Harp said:
Data protection law to students in Beijing? That is, no pun intended, criminally comic.

The next generation of ecommerce programmers. China's data protection laws have increased enormously since 2012, though next year's the biggy: the new Personal Information Protection Law is extremely close to the EU GDPR. (On spam specifically, China was several years ahead of the EU in requiring an opt-in for receipt of spam when the EU was still faffing about with 'opt out'.) They're pretty ruthless on enforcement, too. Interestingly, despite popular perceptions, China is well behind the world-leading countries as a point of origin for spammers - https://www.statista.com/statistics/263086/countries-of-origin-of-spam/ , though it must be a nightmare for anyone trying to enforce these laws anywhere given how much spam can be generated by just a few individuals.

STEVIEBOY1 · Jul 3, 2021

GHT said:
Edward, you are a mine of useless information, it's why your posts make for such an entertaining read. I can even put up with the intrusive adverts for the chuckle I got from your take on Spam.

The luncheon meat in my sandwiches was probably Spam. Cheese sandwiches also had a schoolboy name, we called it, "mousetrap." Probably because Cheddar cheese was the bait on every mousetrap.

School sandwiches were consumed to satisfy hunger rather than to be actually enjoyed. The alternative was the school's cooked meals, not exactly a flavoursome, gastronomic, culinary delight. Who can ever forget either the semolina pudding, or, my stomache feels queezy writing this, the tapioca pudding. The semolina always came with a blob of something disgusting on top, like some cat had disgraced itself. But the tapioca was so gross in appearance that it was, and still is, known as frogspawn.

Yes I Took sandwiches in the end, rather than endure the school lunches which were dire, just as you describe above. At our junior school, if you did not finish the main course, you could not have the desert. I remember there was some type of altercation in the hall where lunches were eaten, with food being thrown around, the guilty boys were rightly made to clear up the mess, then had to visit the headmaster which had painful consequences for them!

Edward Reed · Jul 3, 2021

Bologna with a slice of Kraft cheese and mustard was my go to.
I lived on Bologna sandwiches for quite some time. Now I avoid bread as much as I can so I just roll up ham or turkey sammich meat around a mozzarella cheese stick and dip it in mustard for lunches

Many years ago I acquired the taste for liverwurst. I would build a sandwich with liverwurst, bacon, tomato, with mustard and Parmesan Cheese! a delight with Ginger ale!

School Sandwiches

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