Our Favorite Weird Food Mash-Ups
Do you ever crave a sandwich in which “the vinegary snap of chilled pickle cuts, like a dash of irony, against the stoic unctuousness of peanut butter”? If so, you are not alone! The New York Times published a delightful essay extolling the virtues of the “distinctive little sandwich” known as the PB&P. The writer, Dwight Garner, rhapsodizes at length about his favorite combination, while acknowledging that its sort of counter-intuitive combination of ingredients leads many people to question his palate, or even, his sanity.
Garner makes a pretty good case for at least trying a PB&P sandwich and points out that peanut butter has been one of the more versatile sandwich foundations for years, listing other unorthodox combinations like “mayonnaise, olives, thick onion slices (this was Hemingway’s favorite sandwich), horseradish, bacon, Marmite (in England) and Vegemite (in Australia).” And, of course, there was Elvis’s favorite combo of “peanut butter, banana and bacon.”
Reading about all these food mash-ups made me think about all the weird things that I’ve eaten in my life, especially the things that I only eat when I’m home alone, usually late at night, frequently when I’m in a little bit of an altered state. Some of these combinations have been put together out of financial necessity, many of them have involved Top Ramen, but all of them are delicious, if only for the reason that they were all my own inventions. Like the time that I toasted up apple cinnamon waffles, put slices of Brie on top, and then doused the whole thing with Sriracha? I was pretty sure that David Chang couldn’t have come up with anything better.
And since necessity is the mother of invention, and all of us who work here in the Brooklyn Mag and L Mag offices are very needy people (well, not really, that’s just me) I decided to find out what weird, delicious inventions they’ve all came up with in the past.
