Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

A tale of two sandwiches

I was quite taken with the SPAM website I found last night. It got me thinking...I have never had SPAM. In college somebody gave me a tin of something called "potted meat food product," but I didn't eat that either. I did used to love Underwood Deviled Ham. And then rounding out the tinned meat lineup, there was canned corned beef.

There were two distinct corned beefs in my house growing up. My father loved a canned corned beef sandwich: toasted white bread, with yellow mustard on one slice and mayonaise on the other, sliced corned beef and pickles.

My mother would shudder when he ate it. Mom's corned beef came from the deli and only from the deli, served on rye bread with spicy mustard and swiss cheese.

I knew the origins of my mother's sandwich; my grandfather had grown up in Brooklyn. And my taste swung it that direction [Reubens, actually] , too, so I didn't give dad's sandwich much thought.

Then one day I was flipping through White Trash Cooking and did a doubletake. There on page 73: "Canned Corned Beef Sandwich." The recipe didn't call for yellow mustard, but it did offer the advice that it was "delicious with a Cocola!"

Suddenly dad's sandwich was no longer an abomination, is was as much a part of my culinary cultural heritage as mom's.