Dagwood – A Retrospective

The Dagwood. A cartoonishly gigantic sandwich invented by a cartoon. It’s a giant stack of meat and vegetables and such between 2 slices of bread, popularized in the comic strip Blondie from the newspaper funny pages, misnomer though that may be. Hopefully without violating copyright–fair use, anyone?–let’s take a look at a typical example.

So that’s what, bread; something peeking out underneath some type of lunchmeat; cheese; a lobster, really? nah probably a soft shell crab; onions probably; more cheese; another lunchmeat, ham maybe; carrots; peas; more cheese; spaghetti?; fish; a fried egg; sausages; another nondescript lunchmeat; and the top slice of bread, garnished with an olive on a toothpick.

If you look at a Google Image Search for dagwood sandwich though, real-life examples tend to have intermediate bread slices interspersed throughout, possibly because it’s very difficult to stack that many ingredients without bread to level them and condiments to glue them together.

The potential combinations of ingredients are staggering. This is not a sandwich that encourages a thorough exploration. I could eat one every day for the rest of my life and not make a dent in the possibilities, though it wouldn’t bode well for my diet, not to mention my life expectancy.

So it’s got to be just one epic, iconic Dagwood for this post. How to choose my ingredients though?

Well if I’m going to half-ass this sandwich, why not make it a clip show? I came up in the 80s, and by the standards of the TV we watched back then, we’re overdue for one. We’re in the 14th month of The List, and we’ve covered 40+ sandwiches in that time. That might be a few too many ingredients but if I pick one or two from each month, that ought to make a pretty righteous Dagwood. We’ll share, we’ll grow, and we’ll talk about what we’ve learned.

I’ll start with a slice of rye bread with butter and horseradish, ’cause it’s not a Dagwood without horseradish.

September 2014: Bacon

In our first month of The List, we covered both bacon butties and bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches, and learned mainly that Irish back bacon is terrible, so you should always make your sandwiches with good old-fashioned fatty-as-hell American bacon.

October 2014: Head cheese

A year ago, we covered Vietnamese banh mi, and while sliced hot peppers, cilantro leaves and stems, and pickled vegetables including carrot and daikon radish are the most identifiable ingredients, not to mention the light Vietnamese demibaguettes they come in, head cheese is a common addition. I’d like to say that we learned that month that banh mi are incredible but I think we all already knew it.

November 2014: Roast beef

November of 2014 was a beef-heavy month, with two sandwiches featuring roast beef–the Brazilian Bauru and the iconic Buffalonian Beef on Weck–as well as a third featuring thin slices of steak, the Chilean Barros Luco. That month I learned that even a lean beef roast can be tender and juicy when you roast it right and slice it thin enough, but that it’s often easier just to go to the deli.

December 2014: Lettuce and Tomato

In the closing month of 2014, we covered that most amazing of sandwiches, the BLT. While I could have gone with a second addition of bacon, adding a little salad to this sandwich seemed overdue. We learned then that December is a terrible month for tomatoes. The end of October isn’t much better, sadly.

A lettuce-and-tomato layer needs mayonnaise, so I added another layer of bread at this point before continuing

January 2015: Fried eggs

January was a month of breakfast at the Tribunal, with the American breakfast sandwich being covered as well as the breakfast rolls of the UK and Ireland. We learned that there are a ton of different ways you can make a breakfast sandwich, but an egg fried over-easy isn’t a bad way to start.

February 2015: Hard salami

In February I tried German Butterbrot with a ton of different toppings, including this one. I learned that putting just about any tasty food on buttered bread will result in a delicious snack, though I don’t know that I’d call them sandwiches.

March 2015: Cheese

Hooray for cheese, addictive as crack! In March we wrote about cheese sandwiches in general, but especially the grilled cheese/toastie/jaffle type, which are the best. I’m not sure what I learned making cheese sandwiches, as they’re a classic and a staple that I’ve been eating my whole life. I used a slice of sharp cheddar and a slice of Muenster here, ’cause who ever said a sandwich needs to be symmetrical?

April 2015: Fried Chicken

Oh hell yeah. In April we explored chicken sandwiches, specifically the breaded fried style common to the American South, and I learned in the process that all kinds of people insist on putting pickles in their chicken sandwiches. It’s not my thing, but hey, whatever works. I used a boneless thigh, pounded flat and marinated in buttermilk, ’cause that’s how we do.

I also went ahead and added hot sauce and pickles and another slice of bread ’cause what the hell. It’s a Dagwood.

May 2015: Chickpeas

In May I covered the chickpea salad sandwich, a vegan alternative to tuna salad that I learned was surprisingly tasty. I also learned it was a bit of a pain in the ass to make, so here I used chickpeas in hummus form.

June 2015: French Fries

June’s Chip Butty was not my favorite sandwich of all time–in fact, I learned that I do not much care for the chip butty, but you have to admit, the English-style chip is an iconic ingredient. It would just add too much heft to an already ridiculous sandwich here, so I cut my potatoes thinner, American style, for this use.

July 2015: Argentinean Chorizo

The Choripan that we covered in July has been one of the best experiences I’ve had with sandwiches on the Tribunal. I learned that there are a ton of South American condiments that you hardly ever see in the states that work fantastically well on sausages–Salsa Criolla, Ecuadorian curtidos, but especially chimichurri. For this sandwich I just used the sausage though.

August 2015: Corned Beef

There wasn’t too much for me to learn about the corned beef sandwich in August, but I still surprised myself by 1) making the best corned beef I’ve yet had, and 2) really enjoying the corned beef tongue I made, even though peeling the skin off the tongue makes a repeat prohibitively difficult. For this sandwich I just used store-bought corned beef, which wasn’t even brisket–it was top round, same as the roast beef I used earlier.

Corned beef needs a good hit of mustard, so I spread some Colman’s spicy English mustard on the bottom of a fourth slice of bread and added it before starting on my final layer.

September 2015: Ham

All three sandwiches we covered in September–the Cubano, the Croque-Monsieur, and the Croque-Madame–contained ham as an ingredient, and I’d just prepared a country ham recently so this ingredient was kind of a no-brainer. I learned from making those sandwiches that ham is one of the great sandwich ingredients, country ham more so than most–it was intensely salty with a deep funk that can only come from letting something hang and rot for months. The meal we made of it was breathtaking, and the leftovers are lasting longer than you’d think.

October 2015: Cudighi patty with melted mozzarella

Just a few days ago I posted about this sandwich, which takes a patty of a unique and aromatic Italian sausage particular to the upper peninsula of Michigan and pairs it with melted mozzarella and tomato sauce in a crusty roll. In the process, I learned that Yoopers have a pretty different idea of what’s spicy than I do.

I topped off the sandwich with a final slice of bread and added the classic toothpick-with-olives to complete the look.

Let’s get a different perspective on that, shall we?

So, the big question: did I eat it?

I tried, folks. I really tried. I sliced that thing in half, picked it up with two hands and had a go at it.

You just can’t fit your mouth around a beast like this, unless you can unhinge your jaw like the weird alien lady from the show V. You have to take it in stages. Each bite is like a different sandwich. Here’s roast beef, horseradish, tomato and lettuce. Here’s sausages, mustard, and corned beef. Here’s fried chicken, pickles and french fries. I managed to power my way through most of half the sandwich, sharing the rest with my family.

I have said similar things before, but this time I mean it: this wasn’t a sandwich; it was a stunt. It was a goofy waste of good food. I won’t be doing it again. But goddamn if that thing didn’t look glorious.