Posts Tagged ‘sandwich’
“One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another”*…
Wisdom for the exquisite Existential Comics (“A philosophy comic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also jokes.”)…
Frege was an early philosopher of language, who formulated a theory of semantics that largely had to do with how we form truth propositions about the world. His theories were enormously influential for people like Russel, Carnap, and even Wittgenstein early in his career. They all recognized that the languages we use are ambiguous, so making exact determinations was always difficult. Most of them were logicians and mathematicians, and wanted to render ordinary language as exact and precise as mathematical language, so we could go about doing empirical science with perfect clarity. Russell, Carnap, and others even vowed to create an exact scientific language (narrator: “they didn’t create an exact scientific language”).
Later on, Wittgenstein and other philosophers such as J.L. Austin came to believe that a fundamental mistake was made about the nature of language itself. Language, they thought, doesn’t pick out truth propositions about the world at all. Speech acts were fundamentally no different than other actions, and were merely used in social situations to bring about certain effects. For example, in asking for a sandwich to be passed across the table, we do not pick out a certain set of facts about the world, we only utter the words with the expectations that it will cause certain behavior in others. Learning what is and isn’t a sandwich is more like learning the rules of a game than making declarations about what exists in the world, so for Wittgenstein, what is or isn’t a sandwich depends only on the success or failure of the word “sandwich” in a social context, regardless of what actual physical properties a sandwich has in common with, say, a hotdog.
“Is a Hotdog a Sandwich? A Definitive Study,” from @existentialcomics.com.
* René Descartes
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As we add mayonnaise, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to Norbert Wiener; he was born on this date in 1894. A computer scientist, mathematician, and philosopher, Wiener is considered the originator of cybernetics, the science of communication as it relates to living things and machines– a field that has had implications for implications for a wide variety of fields, including engineering, systems control, computer science, biology, neuroscience, and philosophy. (Wiener credited Leibniz as the “patron saint of cybernetics.)
His work heavily influenced computer pioneer John von Neumann, information theorist Claude Shannon, anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and many others. Wiener was one of the first to theorize that all intelligent behavior was the result of feedback mechanisms and could possibly be simulated by machines– an important early step towards the development of modern artificial intelligence.
“Too few people understand a really good sandwich”*…
Every week author Talia Levin (and her editor David Swanson) drop an installment of what has become one of your correspondent’s favorite newsletters, The Sword and the Sandwich: “Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my editor David Swanson, plunge into the strange waters of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order.” It is, as advertised, a profile of one instance of that noble culinary form; at the same time, it is a cultural history lesson and a meditation on life itself. This week’s installment…
First things first, as they rarely are in this series: the kumru is a delightful Turkish variant on the grilled cheese—although, in this case, it is the cheese itself that is grilled. Sometimes called a Çeşme Kumrusu, the sandwich includes the aforementioned cheese (usually sharp kaşar), tomato, and a specialized ovoid chickpea-sourdough bun topped with sesame seeds. Optional but frequent toppings are griddled ribbons of spicy garlic sausage called sujuk (aka “meat spaghetti”); Turkish salami; green pepper; and pickles, served either atop the sandwich or as a side dish.
The sandwich originated in, and is one claim to fame of, the seaside town of Çeşme, facing onto the crystal waters of the Aegean sea from the westernmost point of Anatolia. The bread, in particular, is an ingredient found principally in the Aegean-Mediterranean vicinity: its signature chickpea sourdough starter, baked into generously-seeded loaves, is known in Turkey as kumru, in Greece as eftazymo, in Cyprus as Arkatena. The Greek and Cypriot names are somewhat straightforward: eftazymo, means “to knead seven times”; arkatena comes from arktis, the Cypriot term for chickpea foam. The Greeks seem to have it right: by all accounts, the chickpea-fermentation-sourdough process is temperamental and tricky; one nineteenth-century author, the dashing yet ill-starred Archduke Ludwig Salvator, claimed in an account of his Ionian travels that “to make this bread successfully you needed a black-handled knife, a red blanket and a holy book.”
The Turkish name for this temperamental bread, however, goes full-on figurative, which is where things start getting interesting. Due to the distinctive, pinch-ended oval shape of the kumru’s loaves, the name means “Turkish dove”—a bright-eyed little bird also known as the “collared dove.”
While not literally a bird in a starched ruff (although that’s wonderful to contemplate), the collared dove is an Eurasian species that is one of the great migrants of the avian world. It looks quite a bit like a mourning dove in a kind of abbreviated clerical collar, there to minister to its (literal) flock. Known as a “colonizer” among bird species, the avian “kumru” leapt from Southeast Asia to Turkey to the Balkans, and thence throughout Europe and eventually to the U.S. Its scientific name—bestowed upon it by a nineteenth century Hungarian entomologist and sometime-ornithologist named Imre Frivaldszky—is Streptopelia decaocto, “Streptopelia” meaning “wearing a twisted metal collar or torc” in Greek, and “deca-octo” meaning “eighteen.”
The number, here, is somewhat mysterious. As is often the case in sandwich stories, I’m working from third-or-fourth-hand hearsay, across a few centuries and multiple languages. But I tracked down Frivaldszky’s paper from 1837, in which he describes having discovered the species in Phillipopolis (the ancient Roman name for the modern city of Plovdiv, in Bulgaria), and hearing the following story from villagers (Google-translated from Hungarian, subsequently cleaned up by me):
“A poor but pious girl came to serve a miserly woman; from morning to night she worked, yet had hardly a mouthful of bread, and she was scolded constantly; but her annual salary consisted of 18 pennies. Discouraged under the burden of her meager fate, she raised her burning prayers to the heavens from the bottom of her heart, in order to make the world aware of the unworthiness of her fate. Zeus took pity on her and turned her into a dove, which now, in a turban, announces this bitter fate to the world.”
The bird’s cry does kind of sound like “deca-octo” if you really strain to hear that. It’s a weird story, honestly—quite possibly the inhabitants of Plovdiv were messing around with the scientist in their midst. (Frivaldszky sounds like a cool dude, though—he loved cave diving, explored the Balkans, and discovered 126 separate species, plus had god-tier nineteenth century facial hair). But also…what is the deal with Greek gods transforming people into things as an answer to prayers? This lady wanted a raise, not to become a bird! Maybe she pecked out her shitty employer’s eyes. Who knows. Personally, I would be wary of praying to Zeus, especially as a woman; if he’s not turning you into a dove or flower or whatever, he’s probably gonna turn himself into a bull or a swan and then try to have his way with you. And then you have to wear a torc and coo forever and the Turks name a loaf of bread after you, and you still don’t get a raise! If only there had been a “Servants of Misers Union” and things could have ended very differently. On the other hand, this bird would likely have had a less colorful name.
Anyway, I was extremely grumpy all day for reasons unrelated to this column, and felt the shitty, ozonic, bad-air swelter of a New York summer in all its oppressiveness, and a curdled lump of despair in my chest and gut and I briefly thought I’d lost the ability to write. (It turned out the cure was to poke around in old source material and get very excited about it. It took me like two hours to find the Frivaldszky paper—I had to go through a brief English summary and then a chatty German compatriot of the entomologist first—and, incidentally, all the contemporary English sources about this bird say it’s an “ancient Greek myth” about the servant girl and her eighteen pennies. They are all wrong, because in fact it was a bunch of nineteenth century Bulgarians pulling the leg of a credulous Hungarian traveler).
But before my journey of discovery I had to sulk for like, fifteen hours. It’s part of the process. So there I was, sitting and smoking on my back steps, really working myself up into a good sulk, building up a weighty inner bulkhead of surliness, and suddenly something moving very quickly hits my shoulder and I scream and flail because I have the startle response of a frightened rabbit on meth, and then a tiny little bird falls over next to me, dazed. He’s hopping a bit but seems to be favoring one wing, which is deeply concerning, because my neighborhood is absolutely full of ravenous feral cats, rats, and other things hazardous to an injured bird’s health.
I take a (hot, gross) breath and start getting very upset that I’ve inadvertently caused irreparable harm. I certainly didn’t mean to, just reacting to a feathered projectile striking me at speed. I hop on the phone and first call Animal Control, which directs me to the Wild Bird Fund. This little guy is sitting next to me the whole time:
Just as I’m about to leave a message for the Wild Bird Fund and gather my broken-winged little buddy in a shoebox and drop him off at Columbus and 86th, I try giving him a little stroke on his little wing, and all of a sudden he flies away, beautifully, like a feathered dart. He just needed to catch his little breath.
It turns out he was a fledgling mourning dove—apparently they’re adorably mottled while they’re little and still figuring out how to fly, before becoming the smooth and elegant avians of adulthood. So there I was, brooding over dove-shaped bread. And I thought I killed a dove, and it turned out he was OK! He flew off like a shot. He’s figuring it out! Sometimes life just smacks you with a metaphor. Learning to fly is hard. Even Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast in history, lost herself in the air once on the way to a towering height. But in the end she came up golden. Our little dove is going to be OK.
And so am I. And so are you. And I really want a chickpea loaf full of grilled Turkish cheese, and meat spaghetti, and tomatoes. But I’m not going to complain about it too loudly, because I’m worried some errant god will turn me into a bird whose call sounds faintly like “sandwich!” and a Balkan ornithological anthropology moment will ensue. I can’t risk it! From now on, I will not mourn my fate so bitterly. After all, I didn’t lose my ability to write, as I’d feared. The words are still here, numerous as sesame seeds on the top of a perfect, dove-shaped bun…
There’s much more where this came from: “Notable Sandwiches #104: Kumru,” from @mobydickenergy and @DavidSwansonNYC. You can check out past entries and add The Sword and the Sandwich to your newsletter haul here.
* James Beard
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As we contemplate the cultural consequences of compact comestibles, we might recall that today celebrates an auspicious choice of accompaniment to a sandwich: its National Root Beer Float Day.
“Office hours are from 12 to 1 with an hour off for lunch”*…
Not so, as Tim Hayward explains, in Norway…
… To understand matpakke, you first need to understand a little about lagom. In Sweden, the word refers to a profound belief, at a culture-wide level, in the notion of sufficiency — the correct or adequate amount. This leads to a noble pursuit of balance and moderation in everything. In Norway, there is a similar motivating spirit behind the national packed lunch.
These lunches originated in a system of free school meals launched in 1932 called the Oslo breakfast. It required no cooking and was supplied free to all — including bread, cheese, milk, half an orange and half an apple. This simple, unembellished meal was a universal provision, and proudly displayed an entirely non-competitive standard of adequacy. Rich kids couldn’t get a better breakfast, poor kids wouldn’t have a worse one. The food was precisely sufficient. Today, the noble ideals of the Oslo breakfast persist in matpakke. Despite the encroaching decadence of alien customs, such as going out to lunch, most Norwegians observe the traditions of the state-mandated half-hour lunch break, when every worker from floor sweeper to chief executive will unwrap a wax-paper package containing two sandwiches and one piece of fruit. Being Norwegian, the sandwiches are open-faced and use a modest single slice of bread each — a specially manufactured sheet of greaseproof paper (mellomleggspapir) is placed between the sandwiches to separate them. The fillings are simple: cheese, ham, salami, liver paste or jam. It would, after all, be wrong to include any ostentatious condiments — aside from the occasional pickle or sliced red pepper — and antisocial to produce something that was more pleasurable than that of your colleagues. It would be kind of insulting if your lunch was more temptingly delicious than your neighbour’s . . . if you “looked forward to it” for any reason other than peckishness. I can’t think of any other situation in the world where the driving imperative is for the food to be reassuringly dull…
The “matpakke,” a model for the rest of us to follow? “Beware the rise of the competitive packed lunch” (a gift link), by @timhayward in @FinancialTimes.
* George S. Kaufman
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As we brown bag it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1765 that John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, stepped down as Secretary of State for the Northern Department in the British government.
Montagu is better remembered as the namesake of the Sandwich Islands– named for him by Captain Cook, whose expeditions, Montagu enthusiastically supported while serving as First Lord of the Admiralty.
But Montagu is best remembered (if possibly apocryphally) for his inspiration of our lunchtime staple…
The modern sandwich is named after Lord Sandwich, but the exact circumstances of its invention and original use are still the subject of debate. A rumour in a contemporaneous travel book called Tour to London by Pierre-Jean Grosley formed the popular myth that bread and meat sustained Lord Sandwich at the gambling table but Sandwich had many bad habits, including the Hellfire Club, and any story may be a creation after the fact. Lord Sandwich was a very conversant gambler, the story goes, and he did not take the time to have a meal during his long hours playing at the card table. Consequently, he would ask his servants to bring him slices of meat between two slices of bread, a habit well known among his gambling friends. Other people, according to this account, began to order “the same as Sandwich!”, and thus the “sandwich” was born. The sober alternative to this account is provided by Sandwich’s biographer N. A. M. Rodger, who suggests that Sandwich’s commitments to the navy, to politics, and to the arts mean that the first sandwich was more likely to have been consumed at his work desk…
Wikipedia
by Thomas Gainsborough (source)
“One bullion cube… one Concord grape… one Philly cheese-steak… and a jar of garlic pickles! No one will want to kiss me after these, eh, Smithers?”*…
Kunwar Khuldune Shahid explains how immigration patterns and global politics — plus a bit of serendipity — intertwined to make Philadelphia’s iconic sandwich a hit in a 13-million-resident Pakistani megalopolis…
… [Chef Mazhar] Hussain has worked at some of the most high-profile restaurants in Lahore — Monal, Tuscany Courtyard, Chaayé Khana and Café Aylanto, among others — covering a wide range of cuisines. His experience at Philly’s Steak Sandwich, though, has been unique. It’s a smaller restaurant than those, he says, and the guests come from all walks of life. The one thing that connects them: “The steak sandwich is extremely popular with everyone.”
Philly’s Steak Sandwich sits on a small highway apart from Johar Town’s main food centers, atop a hair salon. The shop fights for customers with a biryani restaurant across the street and buzzes all evening with motorbikes and cars jammed into the cramped parking spaces. The cheesesteak is especially popular among nearby students, who can enjoy it for PKR 579, or a little over two bucks.
…
Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city and the capital of the historic Punjab region, is considered the country’s food hub (although citizens of Karachi loudly dispute that claim). Its location at the crossroads of the many empires to have ruled over the Indian subcontinent, from the Mughals to the British, has added multicultural layers to Lahori heritage and culture. This is reflected in the city’s food, which blends Persian and Afghan flavors, a combination we now deem synonymous with the cuisine of North India — which Lahore was an integral part of before the 1947 partition created what is today called Pakistan, in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent.
That Indic syncretism, which Lahore has oozed with for centuries, is today introducing a new cuisine to the city’s taste buds: Philadelphian. But while Philly’s Steak Sandwich might be the first to put our city’s renowned sandwich on local billboards, Lahore’s love-in with the cheesesteak is, in fact, decades old…
More fission than fusion: “The Amazing Story of How Philly Cheesesteaks Became Huge in Lahore, Pakistan,” from @khuldune in @PhiladelphiaMag.
* “Montgomery Burns,” in The Simpsons
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As we muse on migration, we might recall that it was on this date in 1959 that the St. Lawrence Seaway opened. A system of locks, canals, and channels in Canada and the United States, it permits oceangoing vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes of North America– as far inland as Duluth, Minnesota, at the western end of Lake Superior. The Seaway handles 40–50 million tons of cargo annually, about 50% of of which travels to and from international ports in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
“The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be”*…
From the annals of temperance, a particularly tasty (albeit tasteless) tidbit…
Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.
Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoid breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.
The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.”
New York City at the time was home to some 8,000 saloons. The seediest among them were “dimly lit, foul-smelling, rickety-chaired, stale-beer dives” that catered to “vagrants, shipless sailors, incompetent thieves, [and] aging streetwalkers,” Richard Zacks writes in Island of Vice, his book-length account of Roosevelt’s reform campaign.
The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns. It stipulated that saloons could not open within 200 feet of a school or church, and raised the drinking age from 16 to 18. In addition, it banned one of the late 19th-century saloon’s most potent enticements: the free lunch. At McSorley’s, for example, cheese, soda bread, and raw onions were on the house. (The 160-year-old bar still sells a tongue-in-cheek version of this today.) Most controversial of all was the law’s renewed assault on Sunday drinking. Its author, Finger Lakes region senator John W. Raines, eliminated the “golden hour” grace period that followed the stroke of midnight on Saturday. His law also forced saloon owners to keep their curtains open on Sunday, making it considerably harder for patrolmen to turn a blind eye…
Behind this lifestyle tug-of-war lay a cultural conflict of national proportions. Those in favor of the Sunday ban, generally middle-class and Protestant, saw it as a cornerstone of social improvement. For those against, including the city’s tide of German and Irish immigrants, it was an act of repression—an especially spiteful one because it limited how the average laborer could enjoy himself on his one day off. The Sunday ban was not popular, to say the least, among the city’s Jews, who’d already observed their Sabbath the day before.
Opponents pointed out that existing Sabbath drinking laws were hypocritical anyway. An explicit loophole had been written into the law itself: it allowed lodging houses with ten rooms or more to serve guests drinks with meals seven days a week. Not incidentally, wealthy New Yorkers tended to dine out at the city’s ritzy hotel restaurants on Sundays, the usual day off for live-in servants.
Intentionally or not, the Raines Law left wiggle room for the rich. But a loophole was a loophole, and Sunday was many a proprietor’s most profitable day of business. By the following weekend, a vanguard of downtown saloon-owners were gleefully testing the law’s limits. A suspicious number of private “clubs” were founded that April, and saloons started handing out membership cards to their regulars. Meanwhile, proprietors converted basements and attic spaces into “rooms,” cut hasty deals with neighboring lodging-houses, and threw tablecloths over pool tables. They also started dishing up the easiest, cheapest, most reusable meal they could get away with: the Raines sandwich.
…
The Raines Law debacle was merely a prelude for what was to come. New York reformers had long allied themselves with the Anti-Saloon League, a civilian organization with Midwestern origins that would morph into one of the most powerful pressure groups in U.S. history. By 1919, the efforts of the ASL made nationwide Prohibition the law of the land, putting an end to such quaint half-measures as the Raines sandwich and replacing the Raines hotel with the speakeasy.
Ubiquitous– and inedible: “To Evade Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws, New Yorkers Created the World’s Worst Sandwich.”
* Laozi
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As we reach for the beer nuts, we might recall that today is National Liqueur Day.
The word liqueur comes from the Latin liquifacere, which means to liquefy. A liqueur is an alcoholic beverage made from a distilled spirit. Distillers flavor the spirit with fruit, cream, herbs, spices, flowers, or nuts. Next, they bottle it with added sugar or other sweeteners. While liqueurs are typically considerably sweet, distillers do not usually age their product long. They do, however, allow a resting period during production, which allows the flavors to marry.
With the broad selection of spirits available in seasonal, fragrant, and often curious flavors (vodkas and rums in particular), there is often confusion of liqueurs and liquors. In the United States and Canada, spirits are frequently called liquor. The most reliable rule of thumb to follow suggests that liqueurs comprise a sweeter, syrupy consistency, while liquors do not. Most liqueurs also have a lower alcohol content than spirits. However, some do contain as much as 55% ABV.
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