Arnold Palmer: Half Golfer, Half Beverage, Half Sandwich

Arnold Palmer, your boomer dad or grandpa’s favorite golfer (unless he favors that shady Jack Nicklaus fella), would tell the story like this. He was in a restaurant and ordered his habitual beverage, a mix of about 2/3 iced tea with 1/3 lemonade. When the waitress moved on to the next table, he overheard a woman there say she’d like to order that Arnold Palmer™ drink. According to the Arnold Palmer Enterprises® website, this happened in the late 1960s, while he was working on designing a golf course in Palm Springs. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the name caught on, with no help from Arnold Palmer himself or any of his associates I’m sure, and by the time 30 years later when they partnered with Arizona Iced Tea to sell a canned version of the combo, Arnold Palmer© was already a household name both for the golfer and his namesake beverage.

Where the sandwich fits into this is less clear. The Arnold Palmer sandwich appears to simply reference a sandwich combining both a generic tuna salad and standard egg salad, with no particular type of bread or salad recipes specified. However, a little bit of digging shows that few if any references to this sandwich appear before a September 2012 Bon Appetit magazine listicle entitled “25 Quick and Easy School Lunches to Pack for Your Kids.”

I think it’s important to note that the phrase “Arnold Palmer” does not actually appear in the article, at least in its current form. However, the Google search results for “Arnold Palmer Sandwich” tell a different story.

Bon Appetit may have edited it out, but many subsequently published pages refer to the sandwich as the Arnold Palmer, link back to the BA page, and even reuse the same photograph from the original listicle. I suspect the Bon Appetit page may have originated the name. Is it called it an Arnold Palmer as a reference to fact that it’s combining two popular sandwich fillings, much like the Arnold Palmer beverage mixes together two popular drinks? That makes sense to me, and I don’t have any alternate theories. I’m going to consider this Bon Appetit page ground zero for the Arnold Palmer sandwich phenomenon. Please do contact me and let me know if you have any hot intel suggesting otherwise.

When I was a child, I ate as a child

I’ve talked before about my aversions to food combinations or unexpected crunchy bits left over from when I was a child. I’m over those things for the most part these days, though I still side-eye olives that show up when I’m not expecting them (love olives! love them! but they need to let me know they’re there so I can appreciate them properly). I’ve also mentioned a mild childhood trauma revolving around tunafish sandwiches. There was a time as a child when I ate tuna salad sandwiches constantly, though they would not necessarily be recognizable as such to afficionados of tuna salad. My tuna salad recipe was as follows:

• tuna
• Miracle Whip

Similarly, my egg salad sandwich consisted of

• hard boiled eggs
• Miracle Whip
• a little mustard
• maybe a little more mustard

No diced celery or onions, no pickle juice or pickle relish or pickle anything. Simple salads for a simple kid.

When it comes to Arnold Palmer’s other namesake, the better known iced tea / lemonade hybrid; here’s what lemonade meant to me when I was a kid:

As for iced tea, Mom went through many a cutesy 1-gallon sun tea jug when I was younger. You may know the kind I mean, all decked out in pastel colors and sun rays and flowers and maybe even the words SUN TEA spelled out in yellow, like a Duran Duran album cover as designed by a toddler with sidewalk chalk. I can’t find those things anymore, though I’d dearly love to have one.

Interesting (to me) fact–the lovely reddish translucence of the sun tea turns into a muddy opaque brownish-orange when adding lemonade. Though it doesn’t make sense to make the lemonade separately in this case–just mix some of the powdered lemonade mix directly into your sun tea.

The sun tea with lemonade mix is… fine. It’s OK, a little sweet, a little sour, a little tea-like, but mostly nondescript. More importantly, how does my simulated childhood Arnold Palmer sandwich experience stack up?

It doesn’t, not really. Miracle Whip has the same basic ingredients as mayonnaise–egg, vinegar, oil, mustard–but adds what they call a “tangy zip” with some additional flavors–garlic, paprika, etc. Supposedly Miracle Whip has less fat than mayonnaise, but Miracle Whip, as such “lite” products often do, compensates for the lack of fat by adding an absolute truckload of sugar. This of course made it the ideal sandwich spread for the kid I was 40 years ago. Nowadays, I’m less of a fan.

In fact, this sandwich didn’t even get nostalgia points, quite possibly because instead of chasing my own childhood, I made it more of a universal kids’ sandwich, with white bread and cut crusts. Mom didn’t cut crusts–not that I recall ever asking her to–and she didn’t care much for white bread. We usually had some kind of wheat bread around rather than white–not a full, whole-grain wheat usually, but a honey wheat or something brownish like that. Also, I liked my bread toasted.

This one hit the nostalgia out of the park. Funny how the same ingredients rang so differently just by changing the bread. Now I’m not saying it was good. I’m just saying, this is a set of flavors and textures that evokes childhood for me.

The egg salad especially–that combination of Miracle Whip and mustard recurred through many of my childhood sandwiches. I don’t remember having combined tuna salad and egg salad like this back in the day, but I do remember that Mom would often chop up a hard boiled egg into my tuna salad. I enjoyed this sandwich, but I knew better was possible.

I put away childish things

So what does a typical, grown-up tuna salad recipe look like? A random sampling of recipes shows that, in addition to tuna and mayonnaise, tuna salad will typically also contain finely chopped onions and celery, some salt and pepper, and maybe a tiny squeeze of lemon juice. I made mine with shallots instead of onion–I happened to have some on hand and if anything they are even more grown up sounding than onions, at least to me.

As for eggs–first off, if you’re a totally mature adult recipe blogger and you’re going to make egg salad, it appears to be required that you get brown eggs. They are somehow both more real and more grown-up than regular old white eggs.

Secondly, every mommy blogger on the internet swears by this one secret to making the perfect egg salad: not only should it contain diced dill pickles in addition to the hard-boiled eggs, mayonnaise, and yellow mustard, but you should also drizzle in a little of the brine from the pickle jar. Responsible, mature folks like us don’t call it brine, though. We call it pickle juice.

I thought for kind of a long time about what a grown-up bread to use would be. I thought about sourdough; I thought about whole wheat. Then I thought about that kid I was 40 years ago, the one who didn’t like a lot of things but thought patty melts must be the worst thing on earth, what with the onions and the weird-shaped bread with the seeds in it. Rye bread: Not For Kids, according to Young Jim. However, Responsible Adult Jim consumes a responsible adult amount of seeded rye bread, especially with a responsible adult sandwich like the Arnold Palmer.

As a full-grown adult male of sophistication and taste, I also very maturely add such vegetable matter as tomatoes and lettuce to sandwiches as a matter of course.

I also pondered sandwich engineering. Toasted bread can be too rigid for egg salad, causing the filling to squeeze out the sides with each bite. Soft bread does a better job at forming itself around the filling and protecting it. However, by buttering and toasting only the outsides of the bread on the griddle, leaving the insides soft, I theorized that the sandwich would optimally combine a rigidity of structure with an internal grip that would minimize the amount of ingredient slippage. There may still be some small amount of tuna or egg that would escape, but sensible plate usage could mitigate any resultant mess.

Of course, such a sandwich would be most suitably consumed alongside an appropriate adult beverage.

So I served this grown-up version of the Arnold Palmer sandwich along with its beverage pairing to my wife (of 23 years–our marriage is also a grown-up) and myself. We clinked our cans together, as responsible adults do, and dug in.

This was a great sandwich. There’s definitely something to be said for using mayonnaise instead of Miracle Whip here–no candylike notes to be found in this sandwich–and the little crunchy bits of shallot, celery, and pickle were not out of place. Tuna salad and egg salad are after all both called salads–chopped tuna and a dressing like Miracle Whip are by themselves technically enough to qualify as a salad but onion and celery improve the flavor tremendously. The lettuce and tomato being in the middle of the sandwich actually increased the mess factor, nullifying my careful planning by sliding around willy nilly between the two main fillings and pushing egg and tuna out the sides. Oh well. I think having a plate is probably key for many sandwiches. It tasted good, that’s the main thing.

The Arnold Palmer Spiked though was awful. Tea quality far worse than the plain old Lipton I’d used for the sun tea earlier, and sub-Country Time lemonade, combined with cheap booze. I do not recommend. I’d ask if someone wanted to come over and drink the rest for me, but SORRY, YOU CAN’T COME OVER. We are sheltering in place and being responsible adults. Drink your own booze.

Through a glass darkly

Now is the time on Sandwich Tribunal when we get crafty. I like to take this opportunity to truly live one of our site mottos–anything worth doing is worth overdoing–and come up with some kind of overwrought try-hard version of a sandwich. Hand-whipped mayonnaise. Tuna salad made from sushi-grade tuna. Eggs hand-harvested from the nests of rare breed, free-range hens on a boutique farm. Whole-grain bread baked with a locally-milled flour made from a heritage wheat.

Well I started with that last item, and the bread–oh, it was a mistake. The less said about it the better. I’ll get it right next time. But it gave me an opportunity to rethink things, and I ended up with a pretty good sandwich as a result.

From the beginning, I had my eye on a curry egg salad. I’ve made curry chicken salad before, and it’s mostly been great. Well what’s good for the chicken is good for the egg, or so I’ve heard–I think that’s how the saying goes anyway; I am not good at listening.

Regardless, this recipe on Epicurious sounded pretty good as a starting point, with some modifications–a different hot sauce, homemade curry powder made from toasted whole spices, a tiny little bit of Patak’s garlic relish added in, and finished with some garam masala.

From there, it didn’t take long to get to this idea, which I swear did not start out as an opportunity to make a really bad dad joke. Though there is a pretty bad joke coming. You’ve been warned. I just thought about, hey, what would go with an egg curry? And I answered myself, something else that’s kind of Indian but maybe not really? And that led me to tikka masala, which uses Indian flavors and techniques but may have been invented in Scotland. In any case, tikka masala sauce took part in one of the wildest and best sandwiches I’ve made for the Tribunal, and why not?

So I made some–onions, shallots, garlic, and ginger, sauteed in ghee for quite some time to soften them up; cooked for a few minutes more with my homemade cardamom-heavy curry powder, turmeric, and kashmiri chili; then mixed with tomato paste and yogurt and hit with an immersion blender (to make it smoother for the salad dressing). This is a concentrated version of tikka masala sauce, which would be mixed with more tomato and cream before serving.

Then I combined a small amount of this sauce with a little mayonnaise–maybe a 2:1 ratio of tikka masala to mayo, to make in total a quarter cup of dressing for 2 cans of tuna. I also mixed in diced shallots, chopped cilantro, julienned carrots, and a half cucumber, seeds removed, diced, salted and squeezed to remove moisture.

It was only at this point, after I’d made the whole thing, that I realized I’d invented not only a dish, but a dumb portmanteau.

I bought some Italian bread from a bakery, like a normal sane person would do. I even had them slice it for me. Then I spread the salads onto 2 slices of the bread and dressed one side with a homemade mixed-herb chutney–cilantro, chive, basil, mint, and dill–and the other with some arugula. Nothing says “flight of fancy” like arugula.

Put those two halves together, and voila! A fancypants sandwich, suitable for a fancy lad like yours truly. A little on the messy side, true, even messier than the responsible adult version had been. But whimsy does not scoff at curry sauce on one’s pants. Whimsy looks for pretty patterns in the stains.

BUT WAIT. A fancy sandwich like this deserves an equally fancy try-hard beverage pairing. Homemade lemonade I could handle–hand-squeezed lemon juice, simple syrup, and water would do the trick. I don’t know tea very well though. What kind of tea would a tea snob use to make iced tea, if a tea snob could be persuaded to make iced tea in the first place? I asked my son Damian, a tea snobconnoisseur, and they suggested I pick up some Red Label from, serendipitously on-theme, our local Indian grocery.

Damian’s iced tea technique involved exact temperatures and ratios and filtering and perhaps a dilution step at the end–it was complicated enough that I asked them to make the tea themself. I made the lemonade–the juice of about 7 lemons mixed with about 3 cups of simple syrup and diluted with water to taste.

NOT SO TRY-HARD AFTER ALL! WHAT’S SO FANCY ABOUT PLAIN OLD LEMONADE AND ICED TEA you might be saying to yourself, if you are the kind of person who often reads blogs angrily, looking for things to mentally berate the bloggers over. Hey, we all need hobbies, especially when we’re all on lockdown during a pandemic. But I did get a little bit fancy when assembling the drink.

So how was it? The sandwich was great. I was right, the curry egg salad and tuna tikka “masalad” (I am both proud and ashamed for coming up with this name) are a good combination, and while I’m not sure I’d use the homemade mixed-herb chutney for too many other things, that disproportionately powerful hit of dill from the chutney is actually perfect for the egg salad, taking the place of the dill pickles (and that mommy-blog-favorite ingredient, pickle juice).

The tikka tuna salad works on its own as well–the mayo takes the edge off the tikka sauce, and the combination of sweet crunchy carrot and melony cucumber with pungent raw shallot is perfect. Finally, what more appropriate garnish for tikka masala than cilantro? The tuna is still a major element in the flavor but not the only major element–this is an ensemble piece.

I could probably stand to spread the salads a little thinner but oh well. As for this version of the drink, it was fine. The iced tea was as good an iced tea as I’ve ever had, assertively flavored enough to be refreshing but not tannic enough to become astringent. The lemonade was a bit on the sweet side–I needed to make it thick enough to float the tea, after all–but taking a drink or two and then adding more tea made it perfectly balanced. Probably about 2/3 tea to 1/3 lemonade, just like old Arnold took his. It’s a pretty good drink. Not a bad sandwich either!

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On a side note: I hope our recent post The End didn’t freak you out too much! Clearly it was not the end of the Tribunal; it was only the end of the alphabet. So welcome to our second phase of the Sandwich Tribunal, where we’ll start again with the letter A. We’re not doing any repeat sandwiches–we just missed some things the first time around that we still want to try.

For example, this sandwich, the Arnold Palmer, isn’t mentioned in the Wikipedia list of sandwiches at all. I just read about it a while back and thought we ought to cover it. If you know of a sandwich that we don’t have listed in our Schedule–not something that you scrounged together in your kitchen one day that was good enough to repeat, but a known, named sandwich, a local, regional, national, or cultural specialty–please send it our way!