Odd Family Food Thing
A sandwich is a light meal formed of two pieces of bread with a filling of meat, cheese, or other food.
A cake is a sweet food often made from a mixture of fat, flour, eggs and sugar, which is cooked until the mixture sets.
OK so far.
What's going to happen next?
Well, you see where it says "or other food" in the sandwich section above? That is the thing we have our eye on at the moment. Because there are a few funny things that have been put in sandwiches over the years. I'm sure I do not know all or even many of them, but I can let you have a few pieces of information from the family archives.
Item One. Sugar sandwiches. I think lots of people have had these in my family. Hmm, sugar sandwiches...don't seem quite right somehow. But he or she who goes for the sugar sandwich goes for it because he or she likes it.
I don't know, have you ever heard of this?
It sounds to me like something that appeared after the war. (Second war, there was another one too, sadly). After the war and after food stopped being rationed and you started being able to get things again, I suppose all that sugar was welcome. After all, the English diet was based on milk, eggs, wheat bread, butter, sugar, tea, pork ham or bacon, jam, that kind of thing plus various pies and maybe some roast beef one Sunday? But the point is, sugar was definitely in there, ever since Britain started capturing places and people where sugar grew (to make it easier to put it in our tea, you see).
Ah well, that's the mystery of the sugar sandwich anyway. Sugar butties is another word for it, because most sandwiches (or 'butties') have butter on them as well - yes, it looks like the sugar sandwich may have had some butter in there, too. This is getting silly!
OK I think I've remembered another one. Ready? OK. Syrup sandwiches.
(Pause)
Syrup means Golden Syrup (a product of the Tate and Lyle company, the same Tate as in London's Tate Gallery). On the front of the dark green tin is a drawing of a lion with bees coming out of him, from a Bible story (The Bible, Book of Judges, chapter 14, verse 14). "Out of the strong came forth sweetness", it says. Interestingly, there used to be something like this in other stories, too. I think it was a bull that, if buried, produced a swarm of bees and the honey that naturally came with them. Because bees were a bit magical. They were separate but somehow lived as one whole. They produced mysterious sweetness. You can see a lot of them on early European art objects. They were sacred to the Mother Goddess, as was the bull. Isn't it odd to see the shape of a crescent moon in the bull's horns too?
Golden Syrup is a thick form of inverted sugar syrup (sugar refined and treated so that the molecules split into fructose and sucrose (or levulose and dextrose, because the molecules bend to the left and to the right respectively, as does light if shone through a solution of them)). So it's sweet, thick, and a bit burny-tasting, though only a little bit burny-tasting.
Anyway, that's what it is, but I don't know at all how it gets into a sandwich. Hmm? bread, sugar syrup? Oh well, we haven't finished yet, there is still one more.
There was something funny about the beginning of this post. Something I mentioned that seemed not to fit in. Well, it doesn't fit in, and here's exactly how it does not fit in. First I mentioned sandwiches, then I mentioned cake. I can do no better, in this brief museum tour of family oddities, than to close with a simple presentation of the most disturbing exhibit of all. It can be told in two words, but none can tell what psychological damage it may do to those who hear those two words. Read on at your peril, because this is it now. This is the end. Two tiny little words.
Cake Sandwich.
A cake is a sweet food often made from a mixture of fat, flour, eggs and sugar, which is cooked until the mixture sets.
OK so far.
What's going to happen next?
Well, you see where it says "or other food" in the sandwich section above? That is the thing we have our eye on at the moment. Because there are a few funny things that have been put in sandwiches over the years. I'm sure I do not know all or even many of them, but I can let you have a few pieces of information from the family archives.
Item One. Sugar sandwiches. I think lots of people have had these in my family. Hmm, sugar sandwiches...don't seem quite right somehow. But he or she who goes for the sugar sandwich goes for it because he or she likes it.
I don't know, have you ever heard of this?
It sounds to me like something that appeared after the war. (Second war, there was another one too, sadly). After the war and after food stopped being rationed and you started being able to get things again, I suppose all that sugar was welcome. After all, the English diet was based on milk, eggs, wheat bread, butter, sugar, tea, pork ham or bacon, jam, that kind of thing plus various pies and maybe some roast beef one Sunday? But the point is, sugar was definitely in there, ever since Britain started capturing places and people where sugar grew (to make it easier to put it in our tea, you see).
Ah well, that's the mystery of the sugar sandwich anyway. Sugar butties is another word for it, because most sandwiches (or 'butties') have butter on them as well - yes, it looks like the sugar sandwich may have had some butter in there, too. This is getting silly!
OK I think I've remembered another one. Ready? OK. Syrup sandwiches.
(Pause)
Syrup means Golden Syrup (a product of the Tate and Lyle company, the same Tate as in London's Tate Gallery). On the front of the dark green tin is a drawing of a lion with bees coming out of him, from a Bible story (The Bible, Book of Judges, chapter 14, verse 14). "Out of the strong came forth sweetness", it says. Interestingly, there used to be something like this in other stories, too. I think it was a bull that, if buried, produced a swarm of bees and the honey that naturally came with them. Because bees were a bit magical. They were separate but somehow lived as one whole. They produced mysterious sweetness. You can see a lot of them on early European art objects. They were sacred to the Mother Goddess, as was the bull. Isn't it odd to see the shape of a crescent moon in the bull's horns too?
Golden Syrup is a thick form of inverted sugar syrup (sugar refined and treated so that the molecules split into fructose and sucrose (or levulose and dextrose, because the molecules bend to the left and to the right respectively, as does light if shone through a solution of them)). So it's sweet, thick, and a bit burny-tasting, though only a little bit burny-tasting.
Anyway, that's what it is, but I don't know at all how it gets into a sandwich. Hmm? bread, sugar syrup? Oh well, we haven't finished yet, there is still one more.
There was something funny about the beginning of this post. Something I mentioned that seemed not to fit in. Well, it doesn't fit in, and here's exactly how it does not fit in. First I mentioned sandwiches, then I mentioned cake. I can do no better, in this brief museum tour of family oddities, than to close with a simple presentation of the most disturbing exhibit of all. It can be told in two words, but none can tell what psychological damage it may do to those who hear those two words. Read on at your peril, because this is it now. This is the end. Two tiny little words.
Cake Sandwich.
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