So Retro: Sandwich Loaf

When Eliz of Yum and Megan of I Heart Bacon announced they would be sponsoring a contest involving recipes from old cookbooks, I knew that the time had come for me to attempt a Sandwich Loaf. This is a multilayered creation involving various sandwich fillings stuffed inside a loaf of bread whose exterior has been festively frosted with cream cheese and pineapple juice. It has always occupied a special place in my stepdad's heart, even though nowadays it is rarely found in our fridge.



I didn’t find this recipe in one of those funky old 1950’s booklets festooned with line drawings of diligent housewives and atomic age appliances. Instead it has been preserved in the form of a carefully typed and hand-edited note by the woman who always had a Sandwich Loaf wrapped in wax paper and waiting in the icebox whenever my stepdad came to visit her in Florida. Take a look:



Seeing how much energy was invested in the creation of these artifacts (recipe and Loaf alike) made me think about how much the act of cooking has changed over the last fifty years. Our food supply is higher-quality and much more global, but most of us just don’t have the time to make labor-intensive dishes anymore. Perhaps I should say that most of us just don’t make the time. Nowadays, any American willing to cook “slow food” is making a deliberate lifestyle choice to take part in culinary creation instead of picking up a pizza and participating in any one of the other limitless recreational activities available. But for the women of the Sandwich Loaf era, cooking usually wasn’t a choice at all. I managed to squeeze in the prep work around my full-time job because I find it fun and amusing, but housewives in earlier decades spent their days assembling cumbersome dishes for their families whether they enjoyed cooking or despised it. Regardless, feeding the family still remains a female burden in many households. And yet Food and Wine had only one female "Best Young Chef" on its cover a few months ago. What a crock.

There are of course many reasons why old recipes tend to be more time-consuming than modern ones, but I have always suspected that some of the complexity was the result of a deliberate social conspiracy to keep women’s hands occupied with ridiculously labyrinthine cake recipes. This ensured that they didn’t have time to ponder their lack of power and agency. Or to put it another way: a woman could have a room of her own, as long as it was the kitchen.

Goodness. All this lofty sentiment inspired by a dish as questionable as the Sandwich Loaf. Who would have thought?

The initial creation of the Loaf involved locating bread that had not already been sliced, because the recipe requires horizontal slices for the delicious layering effect. This meant I had to stop by the bakery one morning before work. I left the still-warm loaf on the front seat of my car, and when I returned at the end of the day it had been suffused with the heavenly scent of freshly baked bread. It was all I could do not to tear into it right then and there.

Later I did a big shopping trip to get the ingredients, most of which were in jars or cans. I found it amusing that this recipe demanded that I participate in retro activities such as traveling to the bakery for white bread, and filling my grocery basket with slightly humiliating ingredients such as Cheez-Whiz and pimento-stuffed olives.

My Loaf was to be filled with (bottom to top) chicken salad, egg salad, ham salad and a layer of cheese spread. All the salads involved some combination of mayonnaise, celery and pickle relish. The egg salad required (surprise!) green olives. I used canned ham for the full effect and when I peeled back the metal tab, the smell punched me in the face. It was reminiscent of Fancy Feast, which might explain why our cat Sherman refused to leave my side throughout the entire lifecycle of the Sandwich Loaf.



After the initial assembly but before it could be frosted, Sandwich Loaf needed to spend the night wrapped in waxed paper under a damp dishtowel in the fridge. I obliged, and the next evening painted glorious swirls of cream cheese on all its spongy sides. Radish roses and pineapple rings completed its transformation from a blah bready mass into a white diamond. Unfortunately, the pineapple was very juicy and soaked through my 1950’s doily, forcing me to take a hairdryer to the creation before it was ready for its close-up. I can only tell you that I have rarely felt more foolish than I did in those moments I spent hovering around the Loaf, blowing its little bib dry like some sycophantic stylist readying a celebrity for the red carpet.









I doubt that I managed to present my stepdad with a very accurate rendering of his beloved Sandwich Loaf, but the attempt had to be made. He and Sherman did manage to eat it all in just two days, and I’m grateful to him for making the effort. I can’t say for sure whether I will ever construct a second Sandwich Loaf, but I can tell you with some certainty that I will never again cook with canned ham.