On Fridays, I sit and work in a cafe with a little group of writing friends, and I've
got(ten) into the habit of ordering the same thing for lunch each week (just because it makes calorie-counting easier). Giving me what I
've ordered has, alas, not become the habit of the (AmE)
waitstaff. So, when my special order was agreed-to but not delivered at a new cafe, I grumpily posted the following on Facebook:
To quote myself, from
the previous toast post:
Now, I endeavo(u)r to maintain a descriptive rather than prescriptive attitude toward(s) language on this blog, but I have no hesitation in being prescriptive about toast.
That little Facebook post generated more than 40 comments and 2 additional Facebook posts that afternoon. Then I tweeted about it. All of this was pretty catastrophic for my productivity that day. But,
TOAST!
There are two cross-cultural differences that may have triggered my unsatisfactory lunch. The first is a fairly linguistic problem: the
on. The second is a culinary-cultural problem that is linguistic to the extent that it involves the meaning of
sandwich. And appended to that is the
bacon sandwich problem.
Problem 1: on
The
on problem is that I used an AmE meaning for
on in my
on toast. This usage would be recogni{s/z}ed by a lot of Brits from television, hearing people order
a pastrami on rye or some such. (See my past discursion about
semantic drift in the naming of pastrami sandwiches here. Note: I've never seen a sandwich on rye bread anywhere but on American television while in the UK.) But
on is not what would be said in BrE, especially for toast, because this idiomatic use of
on clashes with BrE use of
on toast, as in
scrambled egg on toast. There, the egg is put on
a slice of toast*, but no sandwich is made. (Americans might call it an
open-face(d) sandwich--
on toast.)
Some overly pedantic British commenters at my FB/Twitter posts (you know who you are) insisted that I had asked for a bacon sandwich placed on top of a
piece of toast.* I call them 'overly pedantic' because while I may not always get what I want when I place this order, no one has ever tried to give me a sandwich atop a piece of toast. It is a possible interpretation, but not one that any waiter would go for. To make it known that I wanted the sandwich bread to be toasted, my English friends tell me I should say
with toast, but I fear that I might get a side order of toast in this case. I have since had success asking for (and receiving) my sandwich by saying "could the bread be toasted, please?"
If I had said I wanted a
toasted bacon sandwich, I would have got(ten) another thing: cooked bacon put between bread and then heated in a (BrE)
sandwich toaster/(AmE)
[toasted] sandwich maker (or more recently:
panini maker). At one of the cafes we work in, such sandwiches are pre-assembled and put in an opaque,
label(l)ed bag, which one can select and then hand to the person at the counter, who toasts it for you. It's ok, but not as good as a bacon sandwich
on/made with toast. This is my opinion. Or it may be a fact.
Problem 2: the sandwich problem
I've dealt with the sandwich problem before at the
baked goods post. Let me just quote myself again:
As an American, I can make a sandwich using sliced bread, a roll,
a bagel, whatever. In the UK, sandwiches are made with sliced bread,
and anything else is called by the name of the bread it's in--for
example, a ham and cheese baguette. A bacon roll is bacon inside a roll that's been sliced in half (usually with ketchup or brown sauce), and is a popular hangover treatment.
Add to the list of things Americans can make
sandwiches with: toast. You might think that's the same thing as sliced bread. You might be wrong. (I love
this old Calvin & Hobbes comic that recogni{s/z}es that it isn't.) I have seen British sandwiches toasted (again:
the old toastie post), but I can't recall seeing any made with toast. Lots of open-faced things on toast (eggs, sautéed mushrooms, [AmE]
canned/[BrE]
tinned spaghetti or
beans, about which another post must be written), but not with another piece of bread on top. Americans make lots of sandwiches with toast, particularly when breakfast foods are involved. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw Better Half make a fried egg sandwich with untoasted bread and ketchup.
Of course, when such disagreements occur, one is bound to hear an English person say 'but we invented the sandwich, so we get to say what it is'. I note/ask here (a)
putting things between bread was happening a long time before the 4th Earl of Sandwich had the thing named after him, (b) who is this
we who invented [or named] sandwiches? You weren't there. The world of foodstuffs-between-bread has changed between the 18th century and now, and you weren't even around for most of that. It's like when football fans (of either type) say "we won!" No, you didn't. You watched someone else win. You may have enjoyed it, but you didn't do it. But there is no doubt that the English are serious about sandwiches. Here's one of three sandwich-filled fridges in a shop in Brighton station. My American food sensibilities generally keep me from buying any of them.
One of my English FB friends responded to my desire for a bacon sandwich on toast with "
No such thing. A sandwich is a sandwich, on toast is on toast." To which some Americans replied "but a club sandwich is always on toast". I'm not sure that's always absolutely true (but
Wikipedia seems to agree with them), but it is typical. And it's something that's escaped the attention of some dictionary-writers, including the OED:
Problem 2': the bacon butty problem
The other thing that Americans said was: "a BLT is always best on toast". So here is the crux of our problem. Not only do we have different sandwich cultures. We have very specific different
bacon sandwich cultures.
To Americans, the prototypical bacon sandwich is the
BLT (or
bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich). It's usually made with mayonnaise and the bread is usually toasted. Like so:
To the English, the prototypical bacon sandwich is the
bacon butty aka
bacon sarnie. Just bacon and optionally ketchup or
brown sauce on (usually) buttered, untoasted bread (supposedly brown sauce is the more northern way to have it, but most people I know down south prefer it that way too, as do I). (The
Wikipedia entry for this is pretty [BrE]
rubbish. C'mon UK Wikipedians! Priorities!)
This (orig. AmE in this sense) guy took this photo to celebrate his Father's Day breakfast:
And this picture looks just like what I get in the cafes, but they give me much less bacon (which is good for the calorie-counting, not so good for the sandwich). I must note here that in both the non-toasting cafes, the thing on the menu was
bacon butty. So my whole trying-to-get-toast thing was probably doomed from the start.
*
According to
GloWBE,
slice of toast is much more common in BrE (63 instances) than in AmE (8), but both can have a
piece of toast. The differences are not so clear if one looks at
piece/slice of bread.
P.S. [
6 June 2014] I forgot about
rounds! In BrE, people talk about
rounds of toast and
rounds of sandwiches. I always find this confusing. Here's the
Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary definition:
8 (British English) a whole slice of bread; sandwiches made from two whole slices of bread
- Who's for another round of toast?
- two rounds of beef sandwiches
So, if it's toast, it's one slice of bread. But if it's a sandwich it's two. If it's cheese on toast, it's one. If it's a cheese
toastie, it's two. Got to get that into my head. Except that I just ordered what is described on the menu at this café as "
Toast and jam - a round of white or multi-cereal bread..." And I got two slices. No wonder I get confused.
And why
rounds of sandwiches? Is there any difference in meaning between
two beef sandwiches and
two rounds of beef sandwiches? Answers in a comment, please!
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Until I get my act together and revamp the blog to have this info in a margin, I'm going to continue to commit acts of shameless self-promotion at the ends of posts.
Upcoming talks:
- British & American Englishes: fact versus
convenient fiction
- 'The most acceptable hypocrisy'? Polite words in the UK and US.
- British and American Englishes: facts and fictions
And I'm halfway through my year of providing mini-essays on
British idioms to Focus (UK) magazine, if you're interested.