First it
was reported (i.e. I’m not entirely sure I believe it – I’ve only found one
source for it) that Flight Captain Noushad of
Pakistan International Airlines delayed take off a flight from Lahore to New York for two hours, while he waited for a sandwich
to be delivered to him from a five star hotel.
Noushad supposedly said he "needed sandwiches
at any cost" (I know the feeling) after he learned that there were no “gourmet
treats” on board, only peanuts, chips and cookies. He continued demanding the
sandwich even when he was told it could take two hours to get one from the
hotel. And apparently it did. The flight was due to take off at 6.45 and
didn’t leave till 9.15. (All this is “allegedly.”) Food on Pakistani International Airlines sometimes looks like this:
Type “Pakistani sandwich” into google and you’ll find
a surprising number of surprisingly unexotic sandwich recipes. On the website pakistanifun.com you can find a
recipe for a French Chicken sandwich, but at least
it’s in Urdu.
Meanwhile
the BBC reported that in Khartoum rising prices mean that people can no longer
afford their traditional falafels, so they’re eating cheaper foods in their
sandwiches and coming up with exotic names for them. A banana in a
roll is now a Gigabyte sandwich. Another
sandwich, the Sound System, contains cows' ears. I find it surprising that bananas are cheaper
than chickpeas even in Sudan, cow ears I’m not so sure. In any case they're lining up for it (below).
A company here in the US called Best Buy Bones
specializes in selling cow ears as dog
treats, “A Grease Free Alternative to Pig
Ears” they say. They come in blueberry,
cherry and vanilla flavor, which is obviously going to push the price up, and
they sell for about $2 per ear, which still strikes me as extortionate, but I imagine that price is based on what the
market will tolerate, and that nothing’s too good for people’s effin dogs.
In other sandwich news Anne Fishbein a
very fine photographer, not exclusively but not least of food (you can see her
work on http://www.annefishbein.com), published this photo on her Facebook page showing that
sometimes minimalism is good too:
Compare and contrast with the this bit
of sandwich engineering:
I also came across this school detention slip on a website that collects such things.
It took me a while to realize that YOLO
means “you only live once,” and I suppose different people have different ideas
of what constitutes living, but you can’t help thinking that the “youth of
today” might come up with something a bit more zesty than sandwich throwing.
Crossing my own sandwich threshold – I
ate a Langer’s Number 19, which is by all accounts a very famous, not to say
iconic, L.A. sandwich, and as you see above it contains pastrami, cheese,
coleslaw. It was terrific, not least the
coleslaw, but it was a funny thing, as I ate it I was well aware that the Loved
One would enjoy that coleslaw even more than I did. Such is the nature of long-term relationships.
And then at the weekend we found ourselves
in Sherman’s New York Style Deli and Bakery, in Palm Springs, where I had great
food envy. I ordered an open face corned
beef and chicken liver sandwich, which was very good indeed and looked like
this:
But I kept looking over covetously at
what the Loved One had ordered, the grilled cheese sandwich with crinkle-cut
fried potatoes. She let me have a couple
of potatoes. Such also, fortunately, is the
nature of long-term relationships.
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