Sandwiches with whatever mid-century ingredients you might have on hand

The great thing about 500 Ways to Make Tasty Sandwiches (ed. Ruth Berolzheimer, 1949) is that it reminds me that in the 1940s, people would make sandwiches of just about anything they had on hand.

I mean, people now will argue endlessly about whether a hot dog on a bun can be considered a sandwich. People in 1949 were not only willing to declare that tomatoes and asparagus covered in cheese sauce on a slice of bread was a sandwich, but they would put it right on the cover of a book dedicated to sandwiches! They were not picky about what constituted a sandwich.

I was caught a bit off guard right from the beginning, where most of the first chapter ("Fancy Breads") was dedicated not to sandwich bread or brioche or sub buns, but to the types of sweet loaves people tend to eat with just a smear of butter as a snack or breakfast item. I mean, my first thought is not "Sandwich!" when I see a recipe like this:

Who makes chocolate fruit bread, much less a chocolate fruit bread sandwich?!

I'm not sure too many of the "fancy breads" did end up as sandwiches, though, as they rarely got called for in the sandwich recipes. The main exception was prune bread.

Yep-- Prunes were very popular in the mid-20th-century, so the prune bread did get called out by name.

And if you must know, "Flavorful prune bread makes tempting cottage cheese sandwiches." If you're wondering about cottage cheese sandwiches, the book has a page with 10 different suggestions, from some that might work as potato toppers (cottage cheese and bacon or cottage cheese and chives), to those for people with a sweet tooth (cottage cheese and jelly), to the supremely boring cottage cheese and celery, which sounds tailored to the family that is out of pretty much everything.

There's also a bit of an exotic touch.

It calls for both preserved ginger and ginger syrup!

And if those formulas aren't enough, the section ends with a few more suggestions:

Yep-- you could have cottage cheese and prunes on prune bread! I also love that the booklet considers the cottage cheese and jelly formula to be worthy of  a recipe (equal parts cottage cheese and grape jelly, if you're interested), but considers using preserves, jams, marmalades, or honey to be a separate endnote not worthy of specific measurements. And this is just from the cottage cheese page. There are also other recipes that incidentally include cottage cheese but don't draw attention to it. In short, cottage cheese sandwiches appear to have been really popular.

Prunes weren't limited to bread, either. For anyone who has always longed to mix prunes with canned meat, "catchup," and pickles, there are Ham and Prune Sandwiches.

Not in the mood for prunes or cottage cheese? Fine. The book has plenty of other odd sandwich fixations.

It really loves a sloppy open-face sandwich that must be eaten with a fork. The idea of a cheese poached egg on toast is so popular...

...that it gets pictured not only as the monstrous eye of a scaly alien (scalien?), but also...

...a pulsating sea slug swimming on the pebbly ocean floor.

The fixation on asparagus extends well beyond the cover too (as you may have noticed with the scalien eye, above). If you need a craft project that will also make the asparagus cute, there are Asparagus Crowns.

Break out the donut cutters so you can layer biscuits into little "bonnets" decorated with ornamental asparagus.

I've got to appreciate the mid-century dedication to making everything as gay as possible. I just wish this were in color so I could admire all the different colored hats.

The sauce-covered asparagus sandwich on the cover isn't even the only one! My favorite might be the Creamed Egg and Asparagus Sandwiches.

The recipe itself sounds weird but not necessarily terrible-- little towers of toast, ham, white sauce with hard-cooked eggs, asparagus, and then a second layer with just toast, sauce, and asparagus. My favorite part is really the caption for the picture that goes with it.

Yes, serving straightened cat turds on chunky-style caulk, ahem, I mean "A creamed egg and asparagus sandwich for the the children's lunch will solve many problems," such as having the children want to come home for lunch. They will be happy to pack a lunch and/or eat at friends' houses instead!

Everyone else can go back to bickering about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. I'll just spend the afternoon wondering whether cottage cheese, prunes, and asparagus on chocolate fruit bread under a healthy coat of eggy white sauce is this book's Platonic ideal of a sandwich.