Category Archives: The American Sandwich Series

We spent too much time writing about sandwiches, just so you could know EVERY kind there is.

American Sandwich Series: Sandwiches Oddities of America (Savory Division)

“What’s that?  This is the last one?  The no more sandwich articles?  FREEDOM!  FREEDOM!”

~AFFotD’s Recently Over-Taxed Research Department

the last sandwich

Several weeks ago we embarked on a dangerous mission—to write about every kind of American sandwich that we hadn’t previously covered in our four-part Submarine Sandwiches of America series from over a year ago.  Some thought it couldn’t be done.  Some resigned in outrage.  The rest of us got drunk and decided, “Fuck it, we’ll probably miss a few sandwiches, but whatever” and got to writing.  Since then we’ve talked about American classics, regional favorites, and way more open faced sandwiches than we expected to have to cover when we shruggingly decided to count random piles of shit on a single piece of bread as a sandwich.  But we’ve finally come to an end to our journey, and we’re going to take things out the only way we know how.

By telling you about extremely strange sandwiches that have been created by America’s culinary know-how and disregard for convention.  Well, not like last time when we talked about sweet ones.  This here’s the savory division, y’all.

American Sandwich Series:  Sandwiches Oddities of America (Savory Division)

big ass sammich Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Sandwiches Oddities of America (Sweet Division)

“What?  You don’t think that’s a sweet-flavored sandwich?  It’s got fruit in it, for God’s sake.  Yes, cranberry counts as a fruit, I don’t give a shit if it’s tart!”

~Inter-Office Debate Among AFFotD Staffers

sandwich fool

For the past few weeks, we’ve been shouting at you about various sandwiches that originated in America, using a list of arbitrary rules that, frankly, we’ve ignored more often than not in deciding what sandwiches warrant inclusion in our Sandwiches of America series.  We’re now in the homestretch, where we talk about what we’ve deemed to be the oddest sandwiches in America.  Admittedly, most entries in the open faced sandwich article, and some regional entries, definitely qualify as “odd” but we needed to limit this article’s length so we just kind of played fast and loose with our definitions of regional sandwiches and just general oddities.  Deal with it, this is already published, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.

For the rest of you who don’t particularly care about what sandwich shows up in which article, we’ll delve into our second to last article, where we tell you about strange sandwiches that we’ve decided to arbitrarily place in the “sweet” category.

American Sandwich Series:  Sandwiches Oddities of America (Sweet Division)

god this looks fucking delicious Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Mountain, West Coast and Southern Edition)

“No, we’re not going to do EVERY Southern barbecue sandwich, we’re not insane.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

 sandwiches

So, we’ve been writing about sandwiches a lot lately, and we’re going to keep that train going.  Okay, listen, this is the sixth article out of eight about how bread is a thing that can taste better when you put random shit in it, so at a certain point you just run out of ways to introduce the damn topic.  “Hi, AFFotD here.  As you’ve surely noticed, we’ve decided to take on the daunting task of telling you about every sandwich that’s unique enough to warrant discussion, outside of submarine style sandwiches that we covered in a four part series a year ago.  After telling you about classic sandwiches, open face monstrosities, regional sandwiches of the East, and the unhealthy bread monsters birthed by the Midwest, we’re going to cover the rest of the nation, focusing on the South (and Miami, which doesn’t really count as the south), the Mountain Time Zone region, and the West Coast.”

Huh actually that was a decent way to set up this article.  We’re not really sure why we put it in sarcastic quotation marks, come to think of it.  Anyway, let’s talk sandwiches!

American Sandwich Series:  Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Mountain, West Coast and Southern Edition)

 more sandwiches Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Midwest Edition)

How do Midwesterners ever live past 40?  Are their hearts made out of Adamantium?” 

~Non-Midwesterners Reading About Popular Midwestern Sandwiches

italian beef

Another day, another discussion of sandwiches coming long after you’ve tossed up your hands and screamed, “AFFotD, listen, I get it, there are a lot of sandwiches out there, you don’t have to tell us about every damn one!”  Well too late reader, by the time you’ve read this, they’ve all been written, and nothing can stop us from posting them, so you’re going to take your two more weeks of sandwich articles and like it!

Anyway, we’re moving on to the Midwest now in our regional portion of sandwich celebration.  As stated in the first article of the series, there will be no discussion of hot dogs, and we’ve also covered regional favorites such as the Italian Beef (though we put that picture up there because, God, how good does that look right now?).  But don’t worry, there will be plenty of unhealthy food items, even from Chicago despite our decision not to include literally every food they’re famous for, for you to stuff down your gullet before sobbingly calling your dietitian to apologize for cheating.  Westward, ho!

American Sandwich Series:  Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (Midwest Edition)

giant sandwich Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Lesser-Known Regional Sandwiches of America (East Coast Edition)

American Sandwich Series: Open faced Sandwiches of America

“There can’t be that many distinct open faced sandwiches out there, right?  Right?  Why are you guys so mad, Research Department?”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

open face sandwich

We’ve started on a journey here at America Fun Fact of the Day.  A journey to learn way more than we need to about sandwiches.  So far, we’ve covered classic and traditional sandwiches ranging from the BLT to the PB&J to a bunch that actually have full names that can be spelled out.  We’re on the third of eight articles on the subject, because someone once told us that you can never write too much about sandwiches, and we’re looking to expose him as the filthy fucking liar that he is.  Which brings us to a specific genre of sandwich that often gets overlooked—the open faced sandwich.  Really, this concept predates the actual sandwich, and some might take issue with a single slice of bread covered with additional food items being called a sandwich, to which we’d say you need to find more interesting things to have strong opinions of.

Open sandwiches appear everywhere, from the Scandinavian Smørbrød to the Russian buterbrod.  Okay, we just copy and pasted those, apparently a Norwegian open sandwich just takes a piece of buttered bread and puts “whatever the fuck you want…meat?  Smoked fish?  Sure” on top, while buterbrod is just tomatoes and sprat on bread which is exactly as depressing as we’d expect from Russia’s contribution to this genre of food.

That said, there are numerous American-created open faced sandwiches.  Most are served hot, and are the ideal American mix of delicious and actively trying to shorten our lifespan.  We can get behind of those, so let’s talk about how America knows how to do open faced sandwiches the right way.  Hah, Russia.  Fucking sprat.  You guys are the worst.

American Sandwich Series:  Open faced Sandwiches of America

open face 2 Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Classic and Timeless American Sandwiches (Part 2)

 “Why are there so many sandwiches?  Why are you making us do this, Johnny?”

~AFFotD’s Research Department

sandwiches for all

Earlier this week, we set some ground rules on what will be a record-breaking (what record?  Fuck if we know, but there’s probably got to be some record out there that this breaks) eight-part article series to tell you about every sandwich we can think of that we haven’t already covered in our previous four-part section about regional submarine-style sandwiches.  So far we’ve told you about five standard classic sandwiches, all of which hit that perfect American sweet spot of being delicious but also pretty unhealthy for you.  We’ve been mainlining sandwiches ever since, trying to find inspiration through a bunch of cheese and/or bacon laden portable bread treats, and our doctor says if we don’t stop eating 10 sandwiches a day we’re going to die.  We told him to shut up, we have articles to right, and we can’t think of a better hero’s death than to die from too many ingested sandwiches.

This article series is already starting to mess with our state of mind.  It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.  Now, more classic American sandwiches!

American Sandwich Series:  Classic and Timeless American Sandwiches (Part 2)

 america sandwich Continue reading

American Sandwich Series: Classic and Timeless American Sandwiches (Part 1)

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

“You can’t get butts in the seat without a gimmick!”

~Bill Veeck

hot dog

As covered a few days ago, baseball and insane hot dogs go together like serial killers and women who send love letters to various prisons who have a lot of issues they need to work out.  We should tease out that comparison a little bit more, but we’re not going to.  Anyway, the point we think we’re trying to make is that, stadiums like to ply baseball fans with booze and food because while baseball can be boring, if you’re drunk and full, you won’t really mind.  This has led to a recent explosion in creative, intense, and, well, insane hot dogs throughout the baseball world.  And while we’ve talked about hot dogs in Major League Baseball stadiums already, that was really us going easy on the rest of you.  Because Minor League Baseball only sustains itself through the unfulfillable dreams of thousands of minimum wage athletes, and ridiculous ballpark gimmicks.  If you think of it, Minor League baseball has probably done it!  Smash a printer like in the movie Office Space!?  Sure!  Dress a dog as the bat boy?  Why not!  Live amputation on the field?  Jesus Christ, no, what the living hell is wrong with you!?

Anyway, if you thought that the last article we had about crazy hot dogs, well…no that was pretty crazy.  But check this shit out too!

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Minor League Edition)

 hot dog wrap Continue reading

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

“Take me out to the barf game, take me out to the puke!”

~Your obnoxious seven-year-old nephew who, you have to admit, probably has a bright parody career ahead of him

messy hot dog

America invented most of the world’s best sports.  Football?  That was us.  Basketball?  Sure, it was by a Canadian, but only because he was being paid by the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA when he came up with it, because Canadian dollars were still printed on tree bark at the time, and we were responsible for all the changes that make it recognizable as a sport today.  Soccer?  Nice try, not a real sport, next question.

But of all the excuses for young men (and women!) to vent out the aggression of youth in a competitive and potentially humiliating environment that has been birthed within these borders, only one sport is iconic enough to be known as our national pastime.  No, not Mixed Martial Arts, that’s a terrible guess, are you high right now?  We’re talking about baseball of course.

You might view baseball as a relic of a simpler age, when men were men, owners were horrific bigots, and amphetamines were just, everywhere, all the time, which would explain why the sport struggles in some markets to maintain its relevancy.  It’s a slow-moving game trying to make its way in a fast-paced world, and say what you will about heart palpitations but taking the majority of the workforce off of Speed in the 80’s didn’t really do much for the pace of the game.  Major League Baseball teams try to combat the issues implicit with asking some 40,000 Americans to sit very still for three or four hours by making a day at the ball game a full entertainment and gastronomical experience.  This involves a gallons of watered down beer and, more recently, absurd, amazing American culinary disasterpieces for us to shove in our faces and slink into our chairs to ride out our food coma contently watching yet another 1-2-3 inning.

Sure, we could go on about crazy nachos served in miniature baseball hats, or giant cups of frozen sugar (okay, so maybe malt cups aren’t exactly a new development) but let’s be real here.  This is America’s sport, we’re going to need to talk about America’s food.  America’s best, most absurdly adaptable, most occasionally unnecessarily expensive food.  Let’s get to it.

The Craziest Hot Dogs in Professional Baseball (Major League Edition)

hot dogs everywhere Continue reading