Something You Should Know - A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

What would happen if you were walking by the Empire State Building right at the time someone dropped a penny, and it hit you on top of your head? Listen as this episode begins with the science behind this hypothetical experiment that reveals whether you would live or die. Source: Bill Sones author of Can A Guy Get Pregnant? https://amzn.to/3ZZbwkF What does it smell like on the moon? What would it feel like to walk on other planets? These are some of the questions we explore as we take an imaginary tour of our solar system with John Moores. He has been a member of the science and operations teams of several space missions and has written dozens of academic papers about planetary science. John is also co-author of the book, Daydreaming in the Solar System: Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration (https://amzn.to/4fbYRPt). Who doesn’t love a good sandwich? What makes a great sandwich? What makes a horrible one? Come along as we take a look back through the history and lore and the sandwich as well as some suggestions on some sandwiches you can make that will knock your socks off. Our guide is Barry Enderwick. He is the quintessential expert on the sandwich and has eaten just about every kind of sandwich (good and bad) you can imagine or has been created since the dawn of sandwiches. Barry is the author of the book Sandwiches of History: The Cookbook: All the Best (and Most Surprising) Things People Have Put Between Slices of Bread (https://amzn.to/3VxNVEI) You surely have had the experience of walking outside into cold weather and then your nose starts running. Why does that happen? You aren’t sick – so why do you get a runny nose? Listen as I give you the medical explanation. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/you-dont-say-why-does-your-nose-run-in-cold-weather Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Then come along on a fascinating tour of our solar system. We'll visit the moon and the planets, Mars, Saturn, and Mercury. Mercury's got this weird orbit. Its day is actually longer than its year. So when I think about Mercury, I think about being able to sort of outrun the Sun at a walking pace. Also, what would happen if you got hit by a penny dropped from the top of the

Empire State Building? And the history of the sandwich and some incredible sandwiches you really should try. One example is the sophisticated club that among other things has peanut butter, coconut, avocado, tomato, ham, and it shouldn't work but it actually does. It shouldn't be as good as it is. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. on something you should know. the comfort of your own home. Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month.

That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi there, welcome to Something You Should Know. I want to start today with a question I bet you have asked yourself and that is, when you go out in cold weather, why does it make your nose run?

Well, it's perfectly normal for that to happen and no one is sure of all the reasons why it happens. But here's what we do know. The nose is kind of a fancy air conditioner and one of its jobs is to warm and humidify the air we inhale. When the air is unusually cold, the nose kicks into high gear to warm and humidify it. Blood vessels dilate, mucus tissues swell and secrete extra mucus, and this extra mucus results in a runny nose. In addition, as the newly heated, newly moist air is exhaled, the moisture in it condenses

when it hits the colder outside temperatures and then drips out as fluid. There's not much you can do about it unless it becomes really severe and apparently there is a prescription available from your doctor but it's just normal and that is something you should know. So you must know something about the solar system. I'm sure you learned in school that we have a sun and that planets revolve around the sun, that we are the third closest planet to the sun and the only one that supports life. So what would it be like to travel around the solar system? What would that

experience be? Well hang on, we're about to take a fascinating podcast tour around the solar system with John Moores. He's been a member of the science and operations team of several space missions including the Curiosity rover mission, he's written nearly 100 academic papers in planetary science, and he's co-author of the book Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon, and Other Adventures in Space Exploration. Hi, John, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Thanks for having me, Mike. So you've studied this, and I just want to get a sense of what is the solar system like? I mean, is it quiet? Does it smell like something? I mean, before we start our journey here, what is it like? Oh, goodness. Each one of the planets is a different place.

And some of the planets even have multiple characters. So I was really thinking and trying to understand recently this in terms of those five human senses, you know, what would it be like to actually be there and what would it feel like as a human being? And how do we know that we know this? Because nobody's ever been to Mercury or Saturn or Jupiter. So when we say when you talk about what what these places are like, how do we know what they're like? CB You're absolutely right there. In terms of human cultural knowledge, we don't know about anything further than the Moon where the Apollo astronauts were. But the great thing is that we've got these sort of robotic avatars, these spacecraft that have gone out and visited all of these other places. And they've brought back data. It's not data in the human sense, but we can kind of translate that so that we can sort of understand what it means to

know what an atmosphere is composed of. We can imagine what that might smell like, for instance. CB What might that smell like? CB Well, one of the ones that I really enjoy, and that I think sort of talks about because we have a little bit of the human side and a little bit of the robotic side is the moon. And of course, the moon doesn't have much of an atmosphere, but we do happen to know what the moon smells like. We found evidence of these sulfur compounds in the surface with our robots. But then when the Apollo astronauts came in from a long day of walking around and doing things on the Moon and dusted off their spacesuits, they could smell the sulfur. They said it smelled like spent gunpowder. And so you get that more

visceral feeling that goes along with that data. It's a common point between the robots and the humans. So take me on a little tour of the solar system and start wherever you want. But just let's hop around and see what things are like. Because I don't think I really have a very good sense of that and would love to. Well, why don't we start with some places that are a little bit more familiar, like place like Mars, for instance. It's really, as Brian Cox likes to say, a dry and frozen

version of our home. You can imagine being out under the Martian sky. You can imagine looking at clouds. You can imagine watching the sunset. And it might seem at first like you're just in a very, very red desert. But there's some things that are weird. The sunset that you see, it's not a red sunset like we get on the earth. It's a blue sunset. So you get that totally different color. And when you're out looking around, there's an extra bit of haziness. It's cold. The pressure is low, so you need to have a bit of a spacesuit to keep yourself alive and to keep going. But when you look at the pictures of a place like this that we've taken with spacecraft, it really does remind you of home, which is really fascinating. And Mars is the most similar place. As you get further out and go and visit other planets, it gets more exotic and stranger.

And it reminds you of home because why? It has mountains and it's solid and it looks like it could be Earth kind of reminds you of? Exactly. Any pictures that anyone's seen of being in a desert. It's a lot like that, in terms of the way that that, you know, it would look. And there are other little touch points as well. You've got the fact that on Mars, the day is just a little over 24 hours long. So you could, you know, have the same sort of, you know, sleep and wake cycle that we have here on the earth. And frankly, the 40 minutes, who doesn't want 40 minutes back in

their day every day? Right. Well, great. What's the next stop on our tour? Venus would be a great place to go next. And Venus has this dual character to it. You've got this sort of hellish world down at the bottom of the atmosphere. Intense pressure, intense heat. It's hard for robots to even go there and to live more than a few minutes. But there's some interesting things to find down there. We do know that Venus perhaps in the distant past was more like the earth and was on a similar trajectory. So maybe there's evidence of that somewhere down there. Up in the atmosphere, totally different story. Once you're 50 or 80 kilometers up, then you're actually sitting in

the most Earth-like environment in the entire solar system. You don't even need a spacesuit there. I mean, the sulfuric acid clouds would be bad for most fabrics, so you should have something to protect you from that. A little bit of oxygen would be good because carbon dioxide is the atmosphere on Venus. But aside from that, the temperature is what you would know. The pressure is what you would know. And it's just a wonderful place to think about just sort of floating there, you know, in a cloud city or, you know, in a balloon festival or something like that.

It's just the kind of thing that grips the mind for me. I'm curious about what you said about robots can't exist for more than a few minutes because of the pressure. The pressure would just crush them? The pressure is not the most dangerous thing. It's the heat. And when you put a robot into an environment like that, with nowhere to dump the heat, it's kind of stuck. Eventually, it overheats and it stops working as well. There are folks who are

looking at trying to create electronics that work in that kind of intense, intense kind of heat where it's like the temperature of a self-cleaning oven. But most of the proposals to visit the surface of Venus, imagine taking along something sacrificial like a big block of wax, for instance. And when that block of wax melts, then the robots have nowhere to put their heat anymore. And essentially, they stop working because they are overheated. That's really interesting. And Mercury, can we go to Mercury?

Certainly. Mercury is is such a fascinating place. And sometimes a little bit neglected. We only have seen the entire surface of Mercury in the past two decades, just from the way that orbital orbital mechanics and our exploration has worked. And Mercury's got this weird orbit. Its day is actually longer than its year. And if you sort of count from sunup to sundown, it's about 176 total days. So when I think about Mercury, I think about being able to sort of outrun the sun at a walking pace. And you could in a very long day, 176 Earth Day long day,

you could walk all the way around the planet. So let me ask you this, let's pause our journey here. So when you watch science fiction TV shows or you look up in the night sky, it all looks very random. You see little specks of things, as the spaceships on TV go by. But our solar system is very ordered in the sense that we have the sun and these planets orbiting around it. Where do they come from? Did they all come from the same place? Are they related at all? Or are they just rocks in the sky that orbit around the sun?

Or are they just rocks in the sky that orbit around the Sun? Well, there is a family relationship here between all of the different planets in our own solar system. Back when the Sun was forming, you had this disk of gas and dust, and it was warmer closer to the Sun, and it was cooler further out. And over time, this disk cooled. If you're far enough out, so around where Jupiter is, then you could condense out things like water ice. And there's a lot of water ice in this disk. So once you condense out a lot of water ice, that can suck up a lot of the rest of the gas and you get gas giants. In the closer part of the solar system, closer to- What is a gas giant? Sorry. Oh, so Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, these are planets that are mostly made of hydrogen gas.

They don't have a solid surface the way that what we call the terrestrial planets do. The ones that are closer in the terrestrial planets, these ones are made up of rocks. And these are places where water couldn't condense as ice, it was too hot. So instead, you had to wait until rock could condense. And that's what made up these planets. So a lot of the variation that we see in the solar system is sort of dependent on what kinds of temperatures were present in that very early disk of swirling

gas and dust. We are on a tour of the solar system and our tour guide is John Moores. He is author of the book Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon and Other Adventures in Space Exploration. Want to become up to 50% wealthier? Paying $0 in management fees with Quest's wealth portfolios can help you get there. Ventures in Space Exploration. you can keep more of your money where it belongs, in your account. Don't wait. Opening an account is quick and easy. Switch to Quest Wealth Portfolios today and keep more of your money. Conditions apply. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example.

Live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you, the Canadian Armed Forces, a message from the Government of Canada. So John, what about the sun? I mean, obviously we can't go there, but what is the sun? How long is it going to last? What does it do? What about the sun? Well the sun is middle-aged, so it's about four and a half billion years old now. Based on what we know of other stars, it's likely to live to be about 10 billion years

old. So we're right in the middle there. You're right, you couldn't stand on the Sun, you couldn't get very close to it without having a lot of trouble. Even comets that go and swing around behind the Sun, don't always come out the other side. Sometimes they'll be broken up or vaporized. But essentially with the sun, what you've got is this sort of, you know, controlled nuclear reaction going on at the core. And that heat and all that energy makes it out so that the surface is glowing. And it's just like being near a campfire or being near the burner on a stove. We get to bask in a bit of that heat.

So what's the next stop on our tour of the solar system? Oh, if we were to travel around, let's go a little bit further out. Let's visit Jupiter, the biggest of all the planets. And when I think of this place, I think about that bottomless atmosphere, what it would be like to be in that atmosphere. And it's Jupiter, it's got a lot of gravity, so I would probably be falling down quite quickly. So the advantage there without that solid surface is you can enjoy the ride a little

bit. You can look out towards the horizon, which is 1500 kilometers away, about a thousand miles. And above the cloud tops, it would probably look something like what you would see on a high mountain on the earth. That's sort of really in a deep blue, maybe even grating into black that you may have seen in pictures that climbers have taken in places like Everest. But rapidly as you go down, the atmosphere gets thicker. There's a couple of cloud layers that you would fall through as you were traveling. And there's not a ton of light there. It would be a little bit dim after you get down through

those clouds. But just that feeling of interiority, just thinking about these vast spaces between those cloud layers. It's like being in some kind of giant fluffy cave, like some kind of Moria type of place. And you couldn't go on for too long. Eventually it would get hot, it would get very dense, like we were talking about on Venus, and it would be a bad day for you or your machines.

I was out walking my dog last night, in fact, and saw this very bright star in the sky, and so I whipped out my phone. I've had that app that you can point at a star, and it'll tell you what it was, and it was Jupiter, and it was really bright. Is it always really bright, or it's just, there's something about last night that made it bright?

Jupiter is one of the brightest things in the sky. The planets do tend to be very bright in the night sky. So Venus, because it's very reflective and it's very close, tends to be the brightest of all of them. But we only ever see it as a tiny crescent if you were able to zoom in with a pair of binoculars and only ever sunset sunrise because it's close to the sun. Mercury is the same way. They stick close to the sun, whereas Jupiter and Saturn and Mars, we can see those later on in the night when it's fully dark. And of those, Jupiter is the biggest and the brightest.

And of those, Jupiter is the biggest and the brightest. So whatever happened to Pluto? You know, that used to be a planet. Now it's not. So what is it and what happened? Ah, Pluto, yes. It is technically now called a dwarf planet. Don't worry. It's still where it was. It's still doing its same orbit. Nothing has changed. It's

just the way that planetary scientists and astronomers think about this body now. What happened with Pluto was we found a lot of other things out near where Pluto lives in the solar system that look a lot like Pluto. It became a question of, are these all planets or is Pluto and all of its kin? Something different. Is that a different kind of family and the decision in the end was Yeah, they're they're a little bit different. They're they're their own thing out there these we call them transneptunian objects So things beyond the orbit of Neptune talk about Saturn because there's a planet that's kind of a show off. It's got the rings and it's pretty spectacular. What are the rings and what's Saturn like?

Oh, Saturn is a jewel of the solar system. And there's just so many fascinating things in that system. The rings themselves, you're talking about this enormous structure made up of little snow particles essentially, like little bits of ice from the size of snowflake up to the size of a house. And the whole thing is maybe whole thing is maybe 100,000 miles across from edge to end, but it's really, really thin, maybe 100 feet thick on average. And all of these individual grains, all of these little snowballs and ice boulders, they're all orbiting independently. So they're all moving around Saturn as if they were all little tiny moonlets. So they're like little moons orbiting Saturn like our moon orbits Earth.

Exactly. They're doing this sort of gravitational dance. And in that dance, you get all of these waves and eddies and other things like we would see if we went down to the shoreline. And they're watching over the show is Saturn, which takes up a quarter of the sky. It's hard to imagine just how massive that would be in your sky if you were, you know, sitting on a ring particle. And when I think of Saturn and when I look at pictures, it seems to be very colorful. Is it just the light reflecting off the ice that makes it so or what?

It's a good question. There's still, I think, some debate as to exactly what causes the colors in these gas giants. Typically, we're looking at the cloud particles, and those clouds can be made of water ice like we have on the earth, but there are other chemical compounds that serve as ice and cloud particles on these giant planets. And they might be colored by other compounds. So you get these wonderful hues of yellows and reds, and each place is different. I'd say Jupiter is probably the most brightly colored. It's got the biggest variation. Saturn's a little bit more muted,

more towards those yellows. And then when you get out further to Uranus and Neptune, more blues. When you look at, and you take a journey through our solar system, which you've just taken us on, and it's pretty fascinating, but you get the sense that most of it is so inhospitable. Does it ever make you think, why us?

Why earth? Why is this so friendly to life? And nothing else is. It is interesting, right? An interesting way that the philosophers of science think about this, they have something called the anthropic principle in which the reason that the Earth is here and why does the universe have the physical laws it does. And they say that the reason for this is because if it didn't, if it was anything else, then we wouldn't

be here to observe it and we wouldn't be here to observe it, and we wouldn't be able to even ask the question. It is a special place, the Earth, I have to say. We haven't found anything quite like it out there in the cosmos anywhere else. Something I find really fascinating just looking in our own galaxy where we have hundreds of billions of stars and hundreds of billions of planets, we now know more planets than there are stars out there is just how many different things there are, how many different ways of putting together matter and placing it at different distances from other stars and mixing things up. To me, it's a wonder if there's not more places. And maybe we'll be lucky and find more places that have life like we have here on the earth. But so many ways for solar systems to go right,

at least as far as human beings are concerned, and so many ways for them to go wrong. Well, this is really interesting. I've learned a lot. I feel like I know my neighbors better in the solar system. So thanks for taking us on a little tour. I've been talking to John Moores. He has been a member of the science and operations team of several space missions. He's written nearly a hundred academic papers in planetary science and the name of his book is Daydreaming in the Solar System, Surfing Saturn's Rings, Golfing on the Moon and Other Adventures in Space Exploration. And if you'd like to read it, you can get a copy at Amazon.

There's a link in the show notes. Thank you, John. Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be here. Breaking news coming in from Bet365, where every nail biting overtime win, breakaway, pick six, three point shot, underdog win, buzzer beater, shootout, walk off,

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Where did they originate? I know I've heard something about the the Earl of Sandwich having something to do with it, but is that the real story? Is a hamburger considered a sandwich? What about a hot dog? What makes a sandwich a club sandwich? Well, you're about to discover all of this and a lot more with my guest Barry Enderwick. He's the biggest expert on the sandwich you are ever gonna find and he

has likely eaten more different kinds of sandwiches than probably anyone on the planet. He has a book out called, Sandwiches of History, the Cookbook, All the Best and Most Surprising Things People Have Put Between Two Slices of Bread. Hey Barry, welcome to something you should know. Well, thank you for having me. Great to be here.

So first, I guess I have to ask, why are you such a sandwich devotee? Why are you so into sandwiches? You know, sandwiches seem to cut across all cultures, cuisines. They've been around for a long time and they've got an enormous amount of flexibility to them from their portability to what bread is used to what goes in between the bread. Well, that's a good reason. And who hasn't had a sandwich? I mean, everybody's had a sandwich. Where did they come from?

Do we know? We've all heard this story about the Earl of Sandwich or something, but you probably know the real story. So what is the real story? Well, the real story is we don't know where they came from, per se. I would say that John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, did an excellent job of getting his name on it. It's rumored that in 1762 or thereabouts, he was playing cards and was really into it and didn't want to

get up. So he had someone bring him meat between two slices of bread. His compatriot said, you know, I'll have what sandwich is having. And by 177777 there was a recipe in a book for a sandwich. So it didn't take long but in my exploration of old sandwiches I've done a sandwich from China called the Rojiamo and it's it was created around 200 BC and it's basically meat stewed in very warm spices shredded and then put into a griddle cake that's mostly split all the way and it looks very much like a sandwich. So I don't know that he necessarily invented it but he certainly got his name on it. Well it doesn't it seem that the sandwich was inevitable with or without him because it's as sooner or later and probably it did happen that several people probably figured you know if we put this between two slices of bread,

it would probably be easier to eat. Oh yeah, for sure. As long as bread's been baked, you know, I'm sure at some point when people started slicing it instead of tearing it, they probably started to put meat in between it or other things in between it and just sort of eating sandwiches that way.

The modern sandwich though that we think of when we think of a sandwich, I mean where did that come from? Was there a birthplace of the modern sandwich? No, I mean it was the evolution basically from the early days when it really was literally just meat between bread. It's just sort of evolved and expanded over time to where we have these rather monstrous looking sandwiches available from different chain outlets now. So there wasn't, I wouldn't say that there was a match moment where it happened.

It just sort of grew. And is it everywhere? Is there a sandwich? Okay. Can you get a sandwich almost anywhere on earth? Does every culture have something that Is there a sandwich? Okay, can you get a sandwich almost anywhere on earth? Does every culture have something that seems like a sandwich? I would say that you could find a sandwich pretty much anywhere in any country. You'd be able to find a version of a sandwich.

I would not say that the sandwiches that we're used to seeing here in the United States, like the Sub shops and things like that, are necessarily in every country. But you can pretty much find a sandwich in just about any cuisine. And would you consider a hamburger a sandwich? I do consider it a sandwich.

In fact, early menus used to call it a hamburger sandwich. And to me, you've got meat and other toppings between bread. That's a classic definition of a sandwich, if you ask me. Right. Well then so would be a hot dog. That's correct. I do happen to think that a hot dog is a sandwich. I have two reasons behind that.

One is very unsatisfying and that is everything's made up. So if you want it to be a sandwich, it is. But the other more logic driven one is that if you look at the hot dog bun, the bun is almost equal thickness on two sides and a very thin hinge. So the hinge there is just, there's an accommodation for the tubular meat. So it technically does fall into the category sandwich in my opinion. Now, if you say, Hey, let's go get a sandwich and you show up and there's hot dogs.

There's going to be a disconnect because people just don't think in that way. But I think technically it does fall into sandwichdom. So what is your favorite sandwich? Boy, that changes so often depending on everything, like how hot is it? How hungry am I? One of my favorite ones is a more recent one called the tomato from Turkey and the Wolf in New Orleans. And it shouldn't be as good as it is.

It's mind-blowingly delicious. It's thick Texas toast that's buttered and griddled, slathered in mayonnaise, they call for Dukes, which has a bit of a tang to it because it's made with apple cider vinegar. Then you put down salted roasted sunflower seeds, thick slices of tomato, salt, pepper, way too much basil, way too much dill and

a squeeze of lemon. And it is, it shouldn't be as good as it is. It's revelatory. So I love that. I always love a good Reuben. Like that is like my go-to if I'm in a sandwich shop and I don't know what to get, that's always a solid move. Isn't it, isn't it such a pleasure when you have, not just a sandwich, but anything like that where it shouldn't be as good as it is and then you taste it and it's just like this present of, wow, wow, I wasn't expecting that. That was fabulous. Yeah, one of the things I do in Sandwiches of History

is I do sandwiches of our history, where I try to capture recipes that are being passed down within families, but not necessarily in a cookbook. And I had that same experience with someone sent in something from the Upper East Coast, Northeast where the grandfather would saute sardines and butter, then add maple syrup and then chili flakes. And there were a couple other ingredients and I thought this is going to be horrific. And I tasted it and it was the exact same thing.

Like, how is this good? This isn't just good, this is great. So you never know. Yeah, you lost me at sardines. I'm sorry. It's. They're not for everyone. They're not for everyone.

They are not for everyone and I'm one of those people that they're not for. Not for. And was there ever a point in time, because it seemed like sandwiches were fairly, I don't know, pedestrian until, with some exceptions, like some great deli sandwiches. But people didn't make exotic sandwiches at home.

It was just peanut butter and jelly and ham and cheese or bologna and cheese but at some point it kind of got more involved like maybe that was in the 70s or 80s where people started making like real sandwiches or is this just my imagination I think you can for me when I look at the sandwich recipes you know I'm making sandwich recipes from the 1800s early 1900s World War two, you know through the depression then World War two and then after World War two you start to see odd combos of things that kind of it's almost a reflection of the optimism and You know feeling after World War two in the United States and feeling after World War II in the United States. One example is the sophisticated club that, among other things, has peanut butter, coconut,

avocado, tomato, ham, and it shouldn't work, but it actually does. It works really well. But you start to see these ingredients being put together that wouldn't have been put together previously. And I think that's reflective have been put together previously. And I think that's reflective of how the nation was. And then it just went from there. Of course, today we have so many different ingredients and so many different cuisines that we can access and infuse into the sandwich.

It's just gone crazy. It's great. Yeah. I wonder if every family has some sandwich that is a little off the mainstream. Like my dad used to eat and I remember when he first showed me that or made one for me and I thought this is not. It's peanut butter, mayonnaise and lettuce. I've had that.

It's great. Believe it or not, that's been in cookbooks too. You know, one of the things that I grew up eating was peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches and I thought my brother invented it. Turns out it's a lot of old cookbooks. But yeah, no, I've done over 100 sandwiches of our history where, you know, people say my grandpa used to make this, my mom used to make this. And some of them are great and some of them are not. So what's a really not great one? I mean, you've probably tried like all kinds of

sandwiches. So what's a really great one that you've tried? You know, I didn't care for the red onion and peanut butter sandwich. That didn't really land for me. That sounds horrible. That didn't really land for me. That sounds horrible. But I mean, to me that sounds like a depression era sandwich where it was you needed to eat something, these are the two things you had, you put them together and then that becomes just part of what you eat because that helped you get through a rough time. And sandwiches historically it seems, the most part contained meat but now there's a lot of non-meaty sandwiches. Well actually there's uh there are sections in some

of the older cookbooks especially in the early 1900s there was a movement towards health for the first time ever and so there's a fair amount of vegetarian sandwiches in those books as well. But they weren't necessarily focused on vegetarian. It would be a vegetarian cookbook maybe, but the sandwiches themselves would not be called vegetarian within a sandwich recipe book. But I think people who are going to eat a sandwich, if you said, hey, let's go get a sandwich, but it's gonna be a vegetarian sandwich. Most people would kind of, the air would go out of the balloon, you know what I'm saying?

Okay. I mean, not if you're a vegetarian, but you know, like for example, that tomato sandwich that I referenced earlier from Turkey and the Wolf, I have yet to meet anyone who didn't absolutely love it. And I'm talking meat eaters, I'm a meat eater, and it blew my mind.

So I tend to wait and see and kind of taste it and then get disappointed if need be. What's the deal with like these little dainty finger sandwiches and cucumber sandwiches you know you think they serve at Buckingham Palace or something like those to me don't seem like real, they're sandwiches, but they're not like, they don't fit the mold of a big party sandwich. Yeah. Sandwiches. So what you're referencing is something called tea sandwiches. The other thing to consider is that sandwiches weren't always intended as the end all be all of a meal. They were part of a,

they were a course within a larger meal. And so you have these diminutive sandwiches that are small and very minimal in their ingredients, you know, and not very hearty because they're not intended to actually fill you up. They're meant to accompany tea or to be sort of like a whet your appetite before we bring out the goose kind of thing. Why is a club sandwich called a club sandwich? Contrary to popular belief, it just evolved out of club houses in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Some people tend to think it's like chicken and lettuce under bread or something like that. And it's unfortunately no, it's club houses.

And it's funny to see them emerge in the late 1800s and early 1900s and how varied they were relative to now. Like some would have four slices of bread, some would have turkey, some would have chicken, some would have turkey and chicken. So it was pretty interesting. Well, what is the definition of a club sandwich? I don't know if there's a hard and fast definition, but I think you have to have at least three slices of bread. You have to have bacon. You have to have turkey or chicken. But it can be, you know, open to interpretation.

I just had a club sandwich at Fuller's Coffee Shop in Portland, and they did it with chicken salad, which I had not had before, and it was delicious. What about the legendary peanut butter and jelly? Do we know where that started? Well, I know that the first mention of that in print was in the Boston Cooking School magazine in 1901. The original sandwich was a piece of bread, peanut butter, another piece of bread, jelly, and then another piece of bread, which actually was pretty tasty. That was kind of a nice change up

on the regular peanut butter and jelly, but that's the first mention in print of peanut butter and jelly. But yet it's so simple and yet it's very, very popular. Certainly with kids, it's very popular. Oh, sure, you get a little sweet, you get a little nuttiness. It's super easy.

It doesn't go bad in your lunch bag as it sits there for hours. And it's tasty. It's, to me, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I was a kid is almost like getting candy because it was so good. One non-meat sandwich that seems to hold its own is a grilled cheese sandwich.

People really have always enjoyed grilled cheese sandwiches and sometimes with tomato in it or whatever, but do we know the origins of that? Or again, it just seems like anybody could have figured that out. Yeah, it's hard to say I pinpointed an exact origin on that. I just recorded yesterday something called

a cheese dream sandwich. And it was from a cookbook in 1912. It was basically a grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't called a grilled cheese sandwich, but that's basically what it was from a cookbook in 1912. It was basically a grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't called a grilled cheese sandwich, but that's basically what it was. So it's hard to say when it was created or who created it, but it's been around for a long time, and it's a vegetarian sandwich.

Give me some other interesting sandwiches and how they're made because people can always rewind this and listen back and get the recipe. They're just, like what's a really cool sandwich to try that you think people would be surprised that it's so good. There's one from France called the pain bagnat. And it's basically you make this sort of nicoise salad, but with anchovy fillets and tuna, and you dress it and you put it into this hollowed out loaf

and you wrap it really tightly with saran wrap or cling film, and you wait it down in the fridge overnight. And all that dressing soaks into the bread. The bread is crusty, so it doesn't completely sog out, and you just get this amazing, delicious sandwich the next day. So that is definitely one that has stood the test of time because it's been around for quite a while.

One more. One more, okay. Well, I think the Reuben is a great example, particularly pastrami Reuben. You just basically have a mustard, pastrami, sauerkraut, and then you griddle it. Oh, and Swiss cheese, and then you butter the it. Oh, and the Swiss cheese, and then you, you know, butter the outside and griddle it

and get it nice and crispy. And it's just delicious. You get a little sharpness from the sauerkraut, you get the richness from the meat, a little bit of spice from the meat, a little spice from the mustard on there. The nuttiness of the Swiss cheese, the nuttiness of the Swiss cheese is fantastic.

So that would be another one I'd recommend. Do you consider the tortilla wrap food, is that a sandwich? Not to me. To me, a tortilla is pretty uniform in thickness and it's wrapped around something as opposed to holding something. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like the closest it gets would be, for me, would be a taco, but a taco is more of a sling. Like the closest it gets would be, for me, would be a taco, but a taco is more of a sling. That said, you know, got wonderful tortas, many, many different kinds and they're delicious. What's another interesting piece of lore about sandwiches

or some really, really horrible sandwich or something? Well, you know how I mentioned that sliced bread was being sold in 1928? More people were buying it than baking it. Well, Fleshman's brothers had a dip in sales and they were concerned about it. So they got together with a marketing agency in New York and they came up with the Eat Fresh Yeast

for Health campaign. And this manifested itself in different ways, but one of them was a recipe from 1936 for the yeast sandwich, wherein you took a compressed yeast cake, added table sauce, which is Worcestershire sauce, mashed it up and put it between buttered bread. It just blows my mind that they actually convinced everyone to eat yeast like that and it was terrible. Made for a terrible sandwich. I've never eaten wallpaper paste,

but I imagine that's what it's like. So here's a, you know, when is a sandwich not a sandwich? And that's an open-faced sandwich because it defies the rule, but it's still called a sandwich. Why? I don't understand why, but I also figure, you know, if it's in a cookbook or in a section in a cookbook

about sandwiches, I know, if it's in a cookbook or in a section in a cookbook about sandwiches, I'm going to make it. Um, I don't want to miss out on a possible delicious sandwich or horrible sandwich even, uh, that was from back in the day, just because it doesn't have a top piece of bread. Um, that gets back to my whole, like, you know, everything's made up. So why not just try everything? Right. Well, and as you, as you point out, if it's in a cookbook, where else would you put it? If it's an open face sandwich recipe, it's where else in the book would it go besides

with the other sandwiches? Right. So every sandwich has bread and one food that is closely associated with bread is butter. So how does butter fit into the whole sandwich story? Up until World War II, almost every sandwich in the United States started with buttered bread, like without doubt, without an exception, everything was buttered. World War II comes along, butter gets rationed, margarine starts to get a foothold. And then by, I don't know, 1950s, 60s, buttering bread was not really done much at all, but

it is still done to every sandwich in the UK and a lot of places in Europe. And it's interesting to make sandwiches of old and people comment all the time, hey, what's with all this butter? And it's like, well, we used to do that, but we don't anymore. Well, this has been fun and you've made me kind of hungry. I've been talking to Barry Enderwick. He is kind of the quintessential sandwich expert and he's author of a book called Sandwiches of History, the Cookbook, All the Best and Most Surprising Things

People Have Put Between Slices of Bread. history, the cookbook, all the best and most surprising things people have put between slices of bread. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks again, Barry. This was great. Thank you. I appreciate it. This was a lot of fun chatting with you.

It's one of those hypothetical questions you hear about that if someone drops a penny off the Empire State Building and it hits someone below would it go right through their head and kill them and the answer according to a book that has a lot of these kind of questions like the title of the book is can a guy get pregnant but the answer is if you drop a penny off the Empire State Building and it hits someone in the head it probably won't kill them in fact you might be able to catch it. It would be going at about 100 miles an hour, but the wind resistance would keep it from

going any faster. However, if you dropped a ballpoint pen, that would be deadly because the streamlined design would minimize the resistance and that would probably kill you. And that is something you should know. I can't express how important and how helpful it would be if you would just share this podcast with someone you know. It's easy to do using the share function on whatever podcast app you listen to on and and really it it helps us so much to help grow the audience and get the word out about this podcast.

Something You Should Know is produced by Jeff Havison, Jennifer Brennan and executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers, thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. There is a fascinating and unique podcast I'd like you to check out, as I have. It's called Only One in the Room. A few years back, Laura Cathcart Robbins attended a writers' retreat where out of 600 attendees, she was the only black one. So later, she wrote about her experience and the article went viral because people understand what it feels like to be the only one in the room.

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