A Fascinating Tour of Our Solar System & The Amazing Story of the Sandwich

Today on Something You Should Know, why do you get a runny nose when it's cold? 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 a 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.
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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, like, 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 you talk about what these places are like, how do we know what they're like? 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, you know, what it means to know what an atmosphere is composed of.
We can imagine what that might smell like, for instance. What might that smell like? 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's a it's a common point between the robots

and the humans so take me on a uh take me on a little tour of the solar system and you know start wherever you want but but just let's let's hop around and and see what things are like because i 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 a place like like mars for instance it's really uh as brian cox likes to say a dry and frozen version of our home you can imagine being out under the martian sky you know you can imagine looking at clouds you can imagine watching the sunset and it might seem at first like you 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 space suit, you know, to keep yourself, you know, 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 uh 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 uh it's a lot like that uh 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, 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 and 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 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 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 you know intense intense you know kind of heat where it's like the temperature of a self-cleaning oven but 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 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 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, you know, 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?

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 what is a gas giant sorry oh uh 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 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. I am a food lover.

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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 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 sort of really 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. Yeah, 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 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 the biggest and the brightest so whatever happened to pluto you know that used to be a, 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.
And 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. And so 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 a little bit different. They're their own thing out there.

We call them trans-Neptunian objects, 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 are the rings and what's saturn like oh saturn is is is a jewel of the solar system and there's there's just so many fascinating things in that system the the rings themselves you're talking about this enormous structure made up of little snow particles, essentially, like little bits of ice, you know, from the size of a snowflake up to the size of a house.
And the whole thing is maybe 100,000 miles across from end to end, but it's really, really thin, maybe 100 hundred feet thick on average. And all of these individual grains, all of these little, you know, 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

there 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 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 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 100 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.
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And don't forget to hit the follow button. I bet it hasn't been more than a day or two or maybe three since you've had yourself a sandwich.
Who doesn't love a good sandwich? So what makes a sandwich a sandwich? Where did they originate? I know I've heard something about 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 going to 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, you know, 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 um 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 a sandwich is having. And by 1777, there was a recipe and 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 Rojia Mo, and 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, and doesn't it seem that the sandwich was inevitable with or without him? Because 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 you know i'm sure at some point when people started

slicing it instead of tearing it um 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. Where did that come from? Was there a birthplace of the modern sandwich?

Not, I mean, it was the evolution, uh, basically from the early days when it really, really was literally just meat between bread. Um, 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 magic 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 seems like a sandwich i would say that you could find a sandwich pretty much anywhere uh 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, it's, you know, 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 is just there as 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 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 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 like this present of wow wow i wasn't expecting that

that was fabulous yeah you know one of the one of the things i do on sandwiches of history is i do sandwiches of our history where i try to capture recipes that are being passed down within families but aren't 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? This isn't just good. This is great.
So you never know. Yeah, you lost me at sardines.
I'm sorry. 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. 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, you know, people didn't make exotic sandwiches at home. It was just, you know, peanut butter and jelly and, you know, 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 or early 1900s, World War II, you know, through the depression, then World War II.
And then after World War II, you start to see odd combos of things that kind of, it's almost a reflection of the optimism 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 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, 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 I grew up eating was peanut butter and dill pickle sandwiches, and I thought my brother invented it. It turns out it's a lot of old cookbooks um but yeah no i've done i've done over a hundred uh 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? Uh, you know, I didn't care for the red onion and peanut butter sandwich.
That didn't really, that didn't really land for me. That sounds horrible.
But I mean, that to me, that, that sounds like a depression era sandwich where it was, you needed to eat something. These are the two things you had, you together and and then that becomes just part of what you know what you eat because that's that helped you get through a rough time and and sandwiches historically it seems for the most part contained meat but but now there's a lot of non-meaty sandwiches well actually there there's uh there are intersections 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 okay I mean and not if you're a vegetarian but but, 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 not, 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 hearty 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 clubhouses 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 clubhouses.
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.
Um, some would have turkey and chicken. So it was, 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, you have to have at least three slices of bread. Uh, 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.
And then, but yet it's so simple and yet it's very very popular but certainly with kids it's very popular oh sure you get a little sweet you get a little nuttiness uh it's super easy it doesn't go bad in your lunch bag as it sits there for hours um and it's tasty it's it's it's to me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when i was a kid is almost like getting candy uh because it was so good one non-meat sandwich that seems to hold its own is a grilled cheese sandwich people like really have always enjoyed grilled cheese sandwiches and you know sometimes with tomato in it or whatever but do we know the origins of that or or again it just seems like anybody could have figured that out. Yeah, it's hard to pinpoint 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. 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 that, and, and, you know, how, how they're made that, that, cause people can always rewind this and listen back and get the recipe. They're just, you know, like, like what's a really cool sandwich to try that you, you think people would be surprised that it's so good.
There one from france called the pan banyat and it's basically you make this sort of niçoise 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 it does the bread is crusty so it doesn't completely sog out and you just get this amazing delicious sandwich uh the next day so that is definitely one that that's has stood the test of time because it's been around for quite a while one more one more okay um well i think the the The Reuben is a great example, particularly pastrami Reuben.

You just basically have mustard, pastrami, sauerkraut, and then you griddle it. Oh, and Swiss cheese.
And then you 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 grilled 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 wrapped 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 yeah 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 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 uh sliced bread was being sold in 1928 more people were uh buying it than baking it well fleshman's brothers uh 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. Um, 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 between between buttered bread.
It just, it blows my mind that they actually convinced everyone to eat yeast like that. And it was terrible, obviously.
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 face 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'm going to make it.
I don't want to miss out on a possible delicious sandwich or horrible sandwich even. 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 if it's an open-faced 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 um up until world war ii almost every sandwich in the united states uh with buttered bread.
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.
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.
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We are the hosts of Buffering the Vampire Slayer once more, with spoilers, a rewatch podcast covering all 144 episodes of, you guessed it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. We are here to humbly invite you to join us for our fifth Buffy prom, which, if you can believe it, we are hosting at the actual Sunnydale High School.
That's right. On April 4th and 5th, we will be descending upon the campus of Torrance High School, which was the filming location for Buffy's Sunnydale High, to dance the night away to 90s music in the iconic courtyard, to sip on punch right next to the Sunnydale High fountain, and to nerd out together in our prom best inside of the set of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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Have you ever heard about the 19th century French actress with so many lovers that they formed a lover's union? Or what about the aboriginal Australian bandit who faked going into labor just to escape the police, which she did escape from them. It was a great plan.
How about the French queen who murdered her rival with poison gloves? I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History. Every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know, and you will never forget after you hear it.
Sometimes we reexamine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas, sharing the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook.

Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts.

And if you're curious, the people I was talking about before,

the Australian woman was named Marianne Bug,

and the French actress was named Rochelle.

No last name, just Rochelle.

And the queen who poisoned her rival is Catherine de' Medici.

I have episodes about all of them.

Okay.