America’s bravest sandwich
by Charles Bean
You want a knuckle sandwich? Roger Penbroke does. He’s just ordered the pork knuckle sandwich at the Highland Tavern in Denver – a flavorful mix of ground pigs’ feet and shanks, battered and deep fried, topped with lettuce and tomato on a toasted bun. “Some pig,” he says as Tabasco remoulade drips down his chin. It’s glorious road food. But this is not America’s bravest sandwich.
For such a simple concept, sandwiches come in amazing variety. From your humble ham-and-cheese to the croque-monsieur, from a corned beef at Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan to a muffuletta at Central Grocery in New Orleans, people can stuff two layers of bread with a lot of inventiveness.
But adventure? That’s not usually what comes to mind. A sandwich is usually the least adventurous thing on a menu.
Here and there, you find a local wonder, something you just can’t get anywhere else. At Primanti Bros. in Pittsburgh, they put everything in the Almost Famous Sandwich – meat, cheese, onions, coleslaw, tomatoes, fries, everything. Dock workers in the 1930s supposedly “could eat the whole thing with one hand and keep working.”
Similarly, the Swedish Royal Bakery in Poway, California, offers the smorgastarta (“sandwich cake”), which combines layers of white bread with geometric arrangements of liver pâté, smoked ham, caviar, cream cheese, hard-boiled eggs, clams, cheese, shrimp, you name it.
“Loose burger,” a sort of sloppy joe without the flavor, has fans across Iowa. St. Louis, not St. Paul, is the place for the St. Paul sandwich, an egg foo yung patty with lettuce, tomato, pickles, and mayo. Needless to say, it’s not particularly popular among Chinese-Americans. Buffalo Jack’s in Covington, Ohio, serves a rattlesnake sandwich, just for the novelty of it.
But the real winner of the search for local flavor ends in Evansville, Indiana. On the west side of town, in an historically German neighborhood, one can find several places proudly serving brain sandwiches.
It looks like a cloud, overwhelming its bun. Devotees praise its creamy texture. Others aren’t so sure. Randy Graves, who has been cooking it at the Hilltop Inn for seventeen years, says he’s never had it “and never will.”
In recent years, diners needed an extra dose of courage because of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or “mad cow” disease. Now that restaurants may not use brains from cows older than thirty months, chefs have chosen to use pork brains. At most German restaurants, liquid courage is still available.
What does it taste like? Nothing, really – deep-fried nothing. The flavor resides in the batter and condiments, such as mustard, onions, and pickles.
Alton Brown, the fastidious personality from the Food Channel, didn’t like it, although he generously admitted it might have just been him. “Did I like the brain sandwich? No,” he said. “Does that mean it’s bad? No. It might be the best brain sandwich in 100 miles. Food that tastes bad is very important. That set me to thinking, ‘It tastes bad because I haven’t had it.’”
It must be a local thing. Brain sandwiches are available all over town, most notably at the Hilltop Inn, a 170-year-old former stagecoach stop that serves 13,000 of these sandwiches each year. “This is better than snail, better than sushi, better than a lot of different delicacies,” says Cecilia Coan, a regular customer. “You’re going to die anyway. Either die happy or you die miserable. That’s the German attitude, isn’t it?”
