Nightmares of Midcentury Americana – the Sandwich Loaf

So that last post was pretty good, right? The one about London’s Salt Beef Bagel? I kind of wish I’d been able to end 2018 on a high note like that. Unfortunately, we have 2 more sandwiches left to cover this December, and one of them is the “Sandwich Loaf“–sometimes called a sandwich cake, a multi-layered, cream-cheese-frosted, sandwich concoction of savory spreads decorated like a cake. This unwieldy stack started appearing in American cookbooks and magazine recipe cards around the late 1950s / early 1960s. According to Sandwich Tribunal reader/commenter Lynn D., they were a common treat to bring to baby showers in Minnesota around that time, and they appear to be descended from the Swedish Smörgåstårta, a word that literally means Sandwich Cake.

Clearly they are not something one should tackle solo, so if I was going to make a Sandwich Loaf, I’d need to make it for a gathering of people, where there would be enough hungry mouths to make a dent in this monstrosity. It is December, though, the holiday season, and finding such a gathering of victims taste-testers is easy enough to do.

So the plan is simple. Make and photograph a Sandwich Loaf and bring it to my office’s annual Christmas party as my contribution to the potluck.

Of course, the evening before the party, I needed to make a six hour round trip to pick up my son from college, and the evening before that, I had to attend my dart league’s championship game, in which my team was competing for the first time in the nine years I’ve been throwing league darts. So the plan was a little bit more complicated than it first appeared. Luckily or not, my team got swept quickly and I made it home relatively early and relatively sober, and got to work.

I’d decided on a recipe I found on a site called Click Americana, featuring misty-eyed nostalgia for the good, bad, and ugly of American culture.

I had bought a good loaf of white bread from my favorite Italian bakery in Chicago, Damato’s on Grand

After removing the crusts (except for the bottom crust–it is supposed to be removed as well but I thought leaving it on would provide a little stability), I ended up with 5 long narrow slices of bread, around 10″x4″x3/4″ each.

Each layer of bread gets buttered before adding the topping. This is to help prevent the topping from soaking into the bread and making it prematurely soggy. As it happens, it is also to help adhere the layers together. (Foreshadowing!)

The first layer was a ham salad. In the case of this recipe, the ham salad is made by combining canned deviled ham with diced pickles. I am actually a lifelong fan of deviled ham, but this particular combination did not fill me with confidence.

After buttering the bottom and top of the next layer of bread, the second filling–chicken salad–was added. I had poached this chicken with aromatics until it was just done, and diced it rather than shredding it, making it somewhat unstable and separable. (More foreshadowing!)

The quantities of spread called for in these recipes makes each layer of filling as thick as or thicker than the layer of bread supporting it. I’m sure that this is a structurally sound design. Also, it is difficult to spread the layers of filling evenly while still keeping it from spilling out the sides of the sandwich.

I… may have forgotten to butter the bottom of the next layer of bread. I certainly buttered the top though, and added the requisite layer of tomatoes. The recipe calls for spreading mayonnaise on top of the tomatoes, but I was already seeing stability issues with this structure and thought it might be smarter to instead spread mayo on the bottom of the next layer of bread.

Again, I checked the side view of the stack, and I was not sure I was looking at something built to last. But of course it is a sandwich, and a sandwich is not meant to last. Besides, the uneven layers appeared to be averaging out to a relatively level whole. So I forged on.

The final layer is of curried egg salad.

By this time, we have a tall, narrow stack of breads and spreads, with no means of ensuring rigidity. I looked around the house for bamboo skewers and came up empty.

Of course, this is not the final height of the sandwich. One more layer of bread remains to be added, and the additional layer of cream cheese (I used my homemade cream cheese, this batch of which was relatively soft and spreadable compared to store-bought cream cheese)

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I had bought a plastic loaf protector with a convenient carrying handle for storing and transporting this creation. However, I had not counted on just how tall it would end up being, and the sandwich loaf itself was taller than the carrying case and its handle combined. So we dug an old round tupperware cake carrier out of the attic, scrubbed ten kinds of hell out of it, and put it, with the sandwich inside, in the fridge to wait for the morning of the party.

On the morning of the party, it dawned on me–I needed to carry this stupid, ungainly, awkward, fragile thing with my on my morning commute, in addition to my backpack, my camera case, and a large shopping bag full of other goodies I was bringing to the party. I would have to squeeze my way onto a train, jostled by elbows, with a big damn cake pan, then subject it to the stop/start lurching and lateral shaking of light rail travel, then walk the three or so blocks to my office, navigating downtown crowds, revolving doors, crowded elevators, and then sit through eight hours of work hoping that this weird stack of mid-century Americana would somehow survive and be edible by party time.

It didn’t. It wasn’t. The end.

Not The End

Of course that was not the only holiday party I would be attending this month. Every Christmas Eve, my family gathers at my mom’s house downstate for a feast of snacks, where boxes of crackers, tubs of cheese, pots full of little barbecue wienies and many bottles of wine are consumed.

By this time, I had discovered a type of horizontally pre-sliced bread (to be discussed in another post) that would increase the stability of the sandwich. I had also decided it should be decorated in such a way as to increase its Christmassy-ness. I had also decided, in order to counteract the additional labor in making it Christmassy, I would be extremely lazy and buy the ham salad and chicken salad from the local deli.

Each slice of this bread is 5″x10″x3/8″. By limiting the amount of filling I spread on each slice, I can dramatically increase the sandwich’s stability. It also doesn’t hurt that I don’t have to ride a train with it.

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For the decoration, I used halved cherry tomatoes alternating with bright green pitted Castelvetrano olives around the periphery, and cut roasted red peppers and halved olives into a poinsettia pattern centered on the cake’s top.

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It was beautiful, if I do say so myself, and while it didn’t exactly take a place of honor as the centerpiece of our holiday spread, it certainly livened up the table.

Here’s the thing, though: nobody wanted to eat it. I thought maybe it was just too damn pretty to cut into, so I cut a slice off one end to reveal the distinct strata of bread, ham salad, chicken salad (slightly less distinguishable due to the light color), tomatoes, and egg salad.

Still, the cake sat, untouched, throughout the feast. I myself was far more inclined to pile little barbecue wienies on my plate then try a slice of this edible art.

Ultimately, though, I knew I needed to at least try it. Otherwise, I would not have eaten every one of the List’s sandwiches as is my goal.

It was… not very good. The chicken salad from the local deli was offputtingly sweet, though that was somewhat offset by the salty ham-and-pickle mixture of the ham salad. The curried egg salad and tomato/mayonnaise half of the sandwich worked a little better, especially with some of the tangy homemade cream cheese included. All taken together though, each bite was a mess.

I know there have been some great sandwich loaves/cakes out there that our readers have eaten, perhaps in the distant past, or perhaps more recently. We’d love to hear about them! Please tell us about your experiences with this odd product of the upper Midwest’s Scandinavian heritage. And stick around, we’ve got one more sandwich to go in 2018!