Don't eat a Virginia sandwich
If you plotted the sardine- and peanut-related preferences of Americans on a quadrant chart, I’d be the dot all the way in the upper right-hand corner. I eat sardines two or three times a week, more than that more often than less, and not only do I have peanut butter in my oatmeal every morning and do things like drizzle it on ice cream, I actually usually weigh it on my kitchen scale because I’m so prone to serving myself five, er, servings. Despite—or perhaps because of—all this, I felt the true terror of the void when I read a recipe in Indignity (which I highly recommend) for “Virginia sandwiches” taken from a 1916 book called Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing Dish Recipes by Marion Harris Neil:
VIRGINIA SANDWICHES
1/2 pint (1 cup) shelled peanuts
2 cans sardines
Mayonnaise or boiled dressing
Buttered rye bread
Put the peanuts through a food-chopper and mix them thoroughly with the sardines, pounded to a paste; add sufficient dressing to hold together, and spread between slices of rye bread.
Cut in triangles and serve.
Among the questions raised for me by this recipe were why; what exactly “boiled dressing” is; what if anything about this is distinctively Virginian; what about the macronutrient profile of this dish would appeal to anyone, given that sardines have plenty of protein and fat on their own and so don’t need more of either; what about the flavor profile of this dish would appeal to anyone; why it doesn’t include spices or anything piquant or fresh or offering textural contrast; whether this is what life was like a century ago and if so whether I should consider more seriously than I do that the various grave problems of our day may be largely resolved a hundred years from now; why the butter; and, again, why. It may raise different questions for you. I had to try it.
The first problem posed here was that my wife, when I told her of my scheme, said things like “Absolutely not” and “That’s disgusting” and “Not in my house,” which I overcame by waiting until she had an errand to run. The second problem was that we don’t have a food-chopper; we do have a food processor but it’s big and I’d decided to halve the recipe and I didn’t think anything especially worthwhile would happen to a half cup of peanuts in it, so I used a mortar and pestle instead.
About 10 minutes of laborious smashing and grinding yielded about what I’d expect from a food-chopper. I drained a tin of Wild Planet sardines in water and dropped them in, then mashed it all into an unappealing, crumbly paste with a fork.
Here we came to my third problem: I don’t keep mayonnaise in the house because it’s revolting (the two circumstances in which I want it—if I’m having a cheeseburger and if I’m having pommes frites—do not occur in my house), and while once I learned what it was I decided it seemed far less revolting than the name made it sound, I still wasn’t going to make boiled dressing. Happily, I decided that my quest for authenticity here wouldn’t be too compromised by doing what I always do and substituting Greek yogurt for mayonnaise. (I used some from Fiddle Creek Dairy in Lancaster County, which is fantastic.)
It took about two heaping tablespoons to hold this together; you could definitely add more if you were inclined. (For me—someone who eats oatmeal with peanut butter every morning and frequently has lentils with sardines for lunch—this was already a bit much in the direction of viscous glop.) When I was done mashing it all up and putting about half the mixture on buttered rye bread from Lost Bread Co. it looked like this:
At about this point my wife returned unexpectedly. (I was slightly more embarrassed than I would have been to have been caught at the dining room table with hardcore pornography, but only slightly.) Nevertheless I forged on and tried the sandwich after cutting it, as per the recipe, into triangles:
Weirdly, this wasn’t bad! It certainly wasn’t good, but it definitely wasn’t bad. There was no cosmic horror in it; it just plain didn’t taste like anything. The peanuts and sardines somehow negated each other, so that it just tasted like fatty protein glop. Grinding the peanuts and vigorously mashing the sardines had even deprived it of any of the crunch the sardine’s bones and peanut chunks might have offered. The most flavorful element was the bread (which to be fair is very good bread). Two thoughts occurred to me: Perhaps the blandness was the point, with the peanuts’ negation of the strong sardine flavor being a way to allow Virginians who don’t like umami goodness to get all the nutritive value of the fish; and perhaps it would be good with some flavorful elements.
I didn’t have any pickled onions around, which were what I really wanted, but some chopped celery greens, salt and pepper, a tomato from my wife’s aunt’s garden, and some hot sauce went a hell of a long way. I still wouldn’t say this was good, but leaving the peanut-sardine mixture soaking in some lemon juice and cayenne for an hour before putting it on the buttered rye, swapping in some radish greens for the celery greens, and adding those pickled onions would probably get it close. I was left with the crucial question of why. (This was roughly 5,000 times the effort of a tuna fish sandwich and came with no attendant rewards; if I’m eating a sandwich with this many calories I don’t want it to taste like a shoe with a good tomato on it.) All I can leave you with is this.
Housekeeping
—Sometimes you stumble on a perfect thing: