HEYDAY OF THE SANDWICH
When it comes to inventive sandwiches, you can’t top 1920s America. Just a decade earlier, New Yorkers were said to eat only six types of sandwich: sardine, tongue, roast beef, Swiss cheese, liverwurst, and egg, according to William Grimes’s book Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York. But three factors—Prohibition, the newfound popularity of automobiles, and women’s increasing independence—had created a tearoom craze across the country, making sandwiches so popular that one New Yorker counted nearly 1,000 different types. In these newly minted salons of sandwiches, customers chose among dubious combinations like cheese-ketchup, lemon-prune, and baked bean–celery. Cookbooks reflected the trend, offering other odd partnerships, such as peanut butter and chili sauce, not to mention shredded coconut, cucumber, and mayonnaise. Makes Elvis’s prized sandwich of fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sound almost tame.