A whole post on half sandwiches.

Part of the New Year's gluttony roundup.

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So I have this problem:  I don't actually need very many calories per day.  This means that I should have smaller portions than are typically served.  Logically, then, I should not eat all of most sandwiches, which are standardized to maintain (or, realistically, to fatten) a person much larger than me.  And yet, the sandwich is a sort of a quantized food.  Except in restaurants that do the half-sandwich, cup-of-soup lunch thing, you generally get an integer of sandwiches on your plate.  And there's a strong visual cue there that says "eat the whole thing."

For a little while, in trying to maintain my new weight, I was  trying out sandwiches that promised to be low in calories.  Take the Subway "fresh fit menu," for example.  I happen to like turkey, so I thought:  Well, maybe I will go ahead and have all of a nominally-six-inch turkey sub, with lots of pickles and hot peppers and spinach on it.  Indeed, as fast food goes, it's pretty good.  Truthfully, though, I probably would have been more satisfied with half a nominally-six-inch Spicy Italian loaded with cheese and oil.  Fat is satiating, after all.

But the real problem with the whole six-inch sub is that it is huge-looking; it reinforces the habit that says it's normal and good for me to eat huge-looking sandwiches; and next time I meet a huge sandwich, it might not be as innocuous as turkey on wheat.  Given that many restaurant sandwiches are huge-looking because they are, in fact, huge, it is a much better strategy for me, the terminally calorically challenged, to default to half sandwiches.

But when I started off on a mission to eat only half sandwiches, I was forced to probe my emotional obstacles to restrained eating yet again, and I discovered this: 

I have serious reservations about eating only half of a sandwich.

Even if the sandwich is twice as big as what I actually want to eat, I am disturbed by the asymmetry of the undertaking.

The data suggests that aspect ratio matters.  I don't mind so much if the sandwich is long and skinny (aspect ratio >> 1), so that by cutting it in half it is transformed into two sandwiches that are still long and skinny (aspect ratio reduced, but still noticeably > 1).  

Take a submarine sandwich, for example, such as the nominally eight-inch versions produced by Milio's, which delivers to my house.

  A nominally eight-inch sub (and yes, that is not half a sandwich already, that is a whole sandwich; a sixteen-inch sub counts as two sandwiches, I don't care how many calories you are allowed to eat per day) is pretty skinny and long (actually it's more than eight inches), and even after you cut it in half it's still longer than it is wide.  It is still, in other words, sub-shaped.  It has preserved the essence of sub-sandwich-hood.  I can eat it and say, "This is a sub."  I am supported in this intuitive conclusion by inductive reasoning:  if there are sixteen-inch subs, and there are eight-inch subs, then logically there should be no reason why there cannot be a nominally four-inch sub, and so on and so on -- too bad this name is already taken.

So I don't have any problems with those.

And I don't have too much trouble with wrapping up half of a sandwich made on wide-pan bread that is wider than it ought to be.  Such sandwiches usually arrive already cut in half, the better to artfully arrange the halves so that they are embracing a cup of soup or a bowl of salad or perhaps a pile of potato chips.  There, you're taking an aspect ratio that is approximately 2 and reducing it to approximately 1, which is really the appropriate aspect ratio for food that comes between sliced bread.

 So easy just to wrap up one of those halves and take it home.

But I find I have this horrible resistance to, for example, half cheeseburgers.  Now I love a good cheeseburger as much as anyone, and I'm not very fond of little cheeseburgers.  When I want a cheeseburger, I don't want the kid's-menu version.  I want a thick medium-rare patty and a lot of lettuce and tomato and pickles and mayo and maybe some bacon.  I would rather have half a grownup cheeseburger than all of a kids' cheeseburger...

... at least till it is time to cut my big grownup cheeseburger in half.  And then I am daunted by the prospect of sawing to pieces something so beautiful and complete, the Platonic ideal of a sandwich in all its circular perfection.   I just know that the tomatoes and lettuce will slip to one side, lubricated by the mayonnaise, and the bun will be shredded to crumbs, and I'll be left picking through the pickles and trying to distribute them equitably between two sort-of semicircular half-patties, no longer crisp all around a lacy edge, rapidly cooling and drying out as the juices run all out of the center, its tender pink cross-sectional area now exposed to the ambient environment, and to the disapproving eyes of any nearby E. coli researchers.

This is where Mark points out to me, "You never have any trouble eating the second half of a whole cheeseburger."  

(Too, too true.  But cheeseburgers are about love and geometry, not reason and rhetoric.)

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N. B.:   The above rant also applies to bagels.

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And then there's the prospect of making one's own half sandwiches from scratch, by which I mean cutting a slice of bread in half and then putting the fillings on one half and topping it with the other half slice of bread.  Do I even need to explain why this is so abhorrent?

Nigel Tufnel can do it for me:

It's okay to make a whole sandwich and cut it in half and share the other half with someone.  But if there is no someone in sight, I have to make a half sandwich.  And that is just wrong.  Perhaps if I laid in a store of frilly-ended wooden picks.

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Mark:  "Perhaps if it is the aspect ratio that bothers you, you should cut circles out of the middle of your sandwiches with a cutter, and eat those."

Me:  "Ummmm... I can't drive and calculate at the same time... what's the diameter of a circle that is half the area of a square of side 1?"

Mark (pulls out iPhone, calculates):  "Approximately zero point eight."

Me:  "So I could eat a half sandwich that looks round if I cut off the edges, a tenth of the width on each side, and trimmed the corners, and only ate the middle."

Mark:  "Sure, why wouldn't that work?"

Me:  "Mark, I already eat all the children's sandwich crusts.  What makes you think I will be able to resist my own?  Duh."

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So this month, I decided to try to beat my irrational resistance to half sandwiches by making and ordering a lot of half sandwiches.

 My first homemade half sandwich was a grilled ham and brie on pumpernickel rye with wedges of green apple melted inside it.  There was no hope of getting anyone else in the family to share this with me, so I was unwilling to grill a normal sandwich and cut it in half.  Nor did I wish to waste brie.  So I carefully took half a slice of bread, cut the rectangular way (since the cross-section of my brie was rectangular) and folded up the ham, a little more deftly than Nigel up there.  I kept the ham from unfolding by weighting it down with the three little pieces of brie.  Then I propped my apple slices among them, and balanced the other half-slice of pumpernickel on top, and smacked it down with my spatula when it threatened to topple over.  How am I going to butter the bottom of this mess? I wondered, but then remembered that I could put butter on the skillet instead.  Somehow I managed to transport the whole topheavy mess to the skillet where it sizzled away, and by employing tongs as well as spatula I managed to turn it over to brown on the other side, only having to stuff one stray piece of apple back in between the chinks.

Once the sandwich had cooled it was pleasant and fragrant as any whole sandwich, and of course the brie had fused it all together so it didn't want to come unfolded anymore.  So that was a success story, though not without its trials.

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It has been slightly easier navigating restaurants, where I vowed to order sandwiches and only eat half until I had firmly established the half-sandwich habit.  

Along the way I amended the rules somewhat:  some naturally-small sandwiches, such as gourmet sliders or Skyline chili dogs, can count as halves (at least if normal people might ordinarily eat two or more of them).    

But most of the time I stuck to it.  On a recent road trip, I asked for my Subway six-inch Italian BMT to be cut in half, and I put the other half in front of the baby, who likes salami.  I asked for a plastic knife at Chick-Fil-A and bisected my #1, hiding one half in the foil-and-paper sack (after harvesting the pickles from it) and consuming the other with a side salad.  Once the sandwiches were safely gone, I found, I no longer felt anxious about their aspect ratios.  

With practice, and a lot of sandwiches, I am optimistic that I will beat this thing.  I'm learning all the time, and that gives me hope.  The other day, at "Moe's Almost World Famous Diner" in Osseo, WI with the kids (en route from Madison), I ordered a patty melt.  

What a revelation:  A patty melt is a cheeseburger on square bread that comes already cut in half!  And here I have been eating patty melts on occasion my whole life, and never noticed that they break the don't-cut-a-cheeseburger principle, and they still taste good.

I gave the other half to the baby (yes, it was cooked through, I checked), and I ate my half patty melt, savoring the taste of triumph.

And the entire basket of fries, too.

Guess I'll have to work on that next time.

Comments

[JeCaThRe]

I feel like this might be revolutionary for me. And that brie, ham and apple sandwich sounds amazing.

[bearing]

Yeah, my all time favorite sandwich is probably turkey, apple, and blue cheese, but ham and Brie and green apple is up there too.

[Barbara C.]

Two things struck me. First of all, YOU HAVE A SKYLINE CHILI YOU CAN GO TO???? I would kill for them to put a Skyline Chili near me...I have to go back to Kentucky to get some.

You have an abhorrence of cutting cheeseburgers in half, but I have always cut hamburgers (except the flat fast food variety) in quarters before I eat them. I think it started when I was a kid and a large burger just seemed so over-whelming. But then again I don't like salad on my burgers...I can't stand warm lettuce or tomatoes.

Oh, and a third thing...that Milio's looks suspiciously like something from the Jimmy John's chain around here. I wonder if it's the same thing with a different name.

[bearing]

No, I don't have a Skyline near me. I wish I did! But I always visit it in Cincinnati over Christmas.

Milio's and Jimmy John's are definitely different organizations. We have both around here.

[Rebekka]

This is so awesome. I love that you calculate aspect ratios. I would have left it at "it's aesthetically displeasing".

Also you guys drive a lot. And eat out lots. Culture shock!

[bearing]

Re: driving and eating out a lot, the last two and a half weeks were unusually heavy on this because of traveling for Christmas. I can expect to be home now for a while.

But I kept it up and had a half grilled cheese sandwich for lunch yesterday (this was not too painful as we all had them and I served them cut in halves already anyway).