Once Popular Sandwiches People Don't Eat Anymore

Foods often come and go, falling in and out of fashion; sandwiches in particular. Arguably the most simple composed and prepared entrée possible, a sandwich is just some ingredients placed between two pieces of bread (or just arranged on top of them, as is the case with the occasional open-faced sandwich). But because of the relative scarcity or abundance of certain ingredients required to make certain sandwiches, some become associated with particular regions or periods of time, which may forever overshadow a surface-level enjoyment of what is otherwise an objectively pretty tasty meal.

Some sandwiches reach cultural saturation and stay there — peanut butter and jelly, ham and cheese, the hamburger, and tuna salad, for example. Others delight millions over countless lunches for a few years, and then slowly fade from prominence as collective tastes change and diners move on to other offerings. Here are some once widely consumed and even beloved sandwiches that just don't seem to be served by restaurants or made at home much these days.

Coronation Chicken is the crown jewel of curried chicken sandwiches. While planning the coronation, or official crowning and ceremonial rise to power for Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, the U.K.'s Minister of Works asked Le Cordon Bleu London to cater a luncheon to be attended by 350 foreign dignitaries. Operators Rosemary Hume and Constancy Spry, both cookbook authors, created a dish specifically for the occasion, and because the luncheon would be prepared by students, and in the small kitchen of Westminster School, it would have to be a simple dish. Originally called Poulet Reine Elizabeth ("Chicken for Queen Elizabeth"), Hume and Spry devised coronation chicken. It consisted of chicken poached in water and wine then slathered in a cream sauce of mayonnaise, whipped cream, a tomato and apricot purée, curry powder, lemon, pepper, and red wine.

The salad, fit for serving on its own or as the filling of a sandwich, was publicized, but because World War II-based rationing rules remained in place, coronation chicken didn't catch on with the general public until after food laws were relaxed. The recipe appeared in Spry's "Cookery Book" in 1956, and made its way into buffets, parties, and as the basis for prepared and restaurant-served sandwiches later on. It can still be found as the basis of convenience store and deli counter sandwiches in the U.K., but it's something of a campy, nostalgic item. It's most often trotted out for home parties celebrating crown events, like royal weddings and coronations.

The heavily processed, sliced, packaged, and alarmingly uniform sandwich fillers collectively known as luncheon meats represent the marriage of modern food production technology with convenience and a hint of ingenuity. Olive loaf, pimiento loaf, and other products consist of mixed and pressed ham, or a kind of bologna, flecked with texture-busting, flavor-adding bits of extra ingredients, like green olive slices, red pimiento bits, or pickle chunks.

Such meats, sold wholesale to grocery store deli counters and standalone delis in large loafs, as well as marketed in smaller packages by the likes of Oscar Mayer, used to be as prominent as other ready-to-go sandwich makings, like ham, turkey, and roast beef. A combination of tastes changing over time and consumer habits shifting, has led to a decline in deli meat sales overall. "Younger folks aren't big on using service counters," Anne-Marie Roerink of 210 Analytics told The Takeout about endangered deli meats. "They are not big on using the meat counter or any counter. They prefer self-serve and often customization through an app or kiosk." Nor are the stores even selling many, if any, olive loaf and pimiento loaf sandwiches anymore. Oscar Mayer no longer even produces olive loaf, while muffuletta-style sandwiches, which utilize an olive melange, seem to have replaced the idea of meats with the olives built right in.

When large numbers of Chinese immigrants settled in New England in the 1920s, many opened restaurants to serve traditional dishes. To attract diners to what was, at the time, an unusual bill of fare to them, restaurant operators sought to ease the transition to Chinese food by marrying it with familiar American elements — thus the birth of the chow mein sandwich. What is it? Seasoned, sauced, and fried flat chow mein noodles, along with bits of celery, bean sprouts, onion, piled high onto white bread, or a bun, covered in brown gravy, and falling out all over a plate.

Likely created in Fall River, Massachusetts, a town near the Rhode Island border where the local economy was historically dominated by textile production, the chow mein sandwich provided lots of energy (it packs a lot of calories and carbohydrates) for mill workers. The dish made its way from Chinese restaurants to local factory cafeterias, lunch counters, and school cafeterias, often served on Fridays to the area's significant Roman Catholic population that eschewed meat consumption on that day during Lent. While it can still be found at Chinese restaurants in Fall River, Massachusetts, the chow mein sandwich never caught on outside of the northeastern United States, rendering it a local and historical curiosity.

The Fluffernutter is a sticky, contested New England favorite. Two different teams of Massachusetts candy makers independently devised a jarred, nearly liquified version of marshmallows in the 1910s, and one of them became Marshmallow Fluff, as produced and marketed by Durkee. One of its creators, Emma Curtis, promoted the product with a recipe for a Liberty Sandwich — peanut butter and the marshmallow substance on barley bread, as a way to follow government suggestions to preserve meat and wheat for the World War I fighting effort. It wasn't popular until another package recipe suggesting the use of Marshmallow Fluff took off — Rice Krispie treats drove sales in the 1960s, and Durkee started printing the fun and cleverly renamed and slightly reworked (for white bread) "Fluffernutter" recipe on jars of its product.

Fluffernutter sandwiches became a local fad in the '60s, so widely eaten and loved by children in particular that Massachusetts had to pass laws to limit the frequency that they appeared on school lunch menus. Never much more than a regional treat and never as popular as it was in the '60s, the Fluffernutter became an increasingly seldomly eaten after-school snack and a piece of edible nostalgia.

While it may sound revolting to those who didn't grow up eating this simple, cheap sandwich, the banana and mayonnaise combination could only have been born in a place where both ingredients are in plentiful supply and already historically factor greatly into a region's culinary landscape: the South. Banana pudding is a staple in the southern United States, and so are mayonnaise-based luncheon salads, so it only makes sense that some unidentified hungry person long ago thought to make a sandwich out of those ingredients. It's believed to have caught on during the Great Depression, when residents of the particularly hard-hit South had to get creative and economical with food choices. Bread was cheap, and sliced bananas provided a meat-like heft.

Those reared during the Great Depression carried on the banana and mayonnaise sandwich tradition, serving them to their own children, thus preserving the sandwich for at least another generation. It's now somewhat of a delicacy, rather than a widely served item. In a 2018 NBC Sports feature, Southern-raised NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt, Jr. shared his recipe and preparation tips for a banana and mayonnaise sandwich, presented as an anomaly more than a traditional, common sandwich, as it's been that forgotten and abandoned.

Variations on the sandwich persist. Do people really eat peanut butter and mayo sandwiches? They do, in smaller numbers than they once did, either with or without bananas, but probably usually with Duke's Mayonnaise, which has a cult following in the South.

With a variety of styles, from cucumber to ham and butter to various savory pastes, finger sandwiches are a delicate, light bite and could once frequently be found on the menus of upscale meetings of civic and social organizations as well as at baby and bridal showers. Elegant and served on fancy plates and platters, finger sandwiches are almost the same thing as tea sandwiches, which appear in England at afternoon tea services.

But the pre-eminence of wealthy community organizations and women's leagues have declined over the last few decades, and younger generations of Britons are moving away from their afternoon tea-and-snack breaks. During the U.K.'s economic turndown in the 1970s, the idea of everything coming to a stop for a while for a cup of tea, along with maybe a sweet or a little sandwich, started to fall out of favor. A full afternoon tea service, with tiers of sandwiches and goodies to accompany a hot cup, is more of a novelty now, something celebrated on holidays, special occasions, or by tourists. That spells the end, or at the least moderate oblivion, for thin, little sandwiches.

"Mock" recipes were big during the Great Depression of the 1930s, born out of necessity. So many people were trying to feed themselves and their families on greatly diminished incomes that they had to cut corners on groceries; especially linked to this time period are mock apple pie (Ritz crackers, cream of tartar, and lemon juice reasonably imitate the taste and feel of cut apples) and mock ham salad. It's similar to authentic ham salad in that mayonnaise holds together chopped sweet pickles, diced onions, and hard boiled egg bits, and different in that it uses chopped grocery store bologna in place of ham. The whole gloopy, porky mixture went onto buns or sliced bread.

After the economy recovered by the mid-1940s, and ham was no longer an out of reach luxury, there was little need to substitute it with chopped bologna anymore. Mock ham salad was relegated to history as an oddity of the stressful and frightening depression, a time few cared to revisit.

In the go-go, party-hard 1920s, the Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, attracted 1,200 guests each night for a lengthy dinner dance. At the end of the evening, it was customary to order ham and eggs from the hotel restaurant, and Chef Fred Schmidt's boredom with that led him to create a bespoke dish in 1926: a turkey sandwich, served open-faced on thickly sliced bread, and topped with tomato, bacon, and Mornay sauce, and then heated under a broiler and given a dusting of pecorino Romano cheese, paprika, and parsley. The Kentucky Hot Brown, as it was named, set off a trend in fancy hot sandwiches prepared by hotel and club kitchens. The Stratford Club in Pittsburgh soon after introduced the similar Turkey Devonshire; the Mayfair Hotel in St. Louis unveiled the Prosperity Sandwich.

Hot sandwiches covered in creamy sauces was a distinctly 1920s phenomenon. While the Brown Hotel is still open and serving plenty of Kentucky Hot Brown sandwiches nearly a century later, the widespread popularity of these elaborately prepared meals in an upscale environment was ultimately a fad that may have died when the Great Depression tore the U.S. asunder in the 1930s.

It's technically a sausage because it's made of pork fat and organ meats (primarily liver), ground until extremely fine and then encased and formed into tubes, but the German food known as liverwurst turns out so soft and spreadable that it can be spread on crackers or bread just as easily as it can be sliced and stacked. Popular in the U.S. from the 1940s until the 1970s, it ranked with bologna as a common and very inexpensive deli counter selection and sandwich filling at lunch spots and in home kitchens. Liverwurst's presence spawned another sandwich sausage that also became a fixture: braunschweiger. It's just liverwurst that's been smoked.

By the 2020s, it was increasingly hard to find even in places heavily steeped in deli culture, like New York City. From 2024 onward, it will be increasingly rare. In September 2024, major meat processor Boar's Head opted to stop producing liverwurst entirely. The meat, processed at and distributed from a facility in Virginia, was the source of a listeria outbreak that led to mass illness and the deaths of nine people.

Scrambled eggs and toast is a familiar if mundane breakfast in the U.S., and a morning sandwich based on those ingredients is just as common. Both of those dishes very much lasted to the present day, unlike Scotch woodcock. Similar in name to another open-faced sandwich with a historical connection to the British Isles — Welsh rarebit, or rabbit, which is cheese-and-mustard sauce poured over toast — Scotch woodcock also doesn't contain any wild animal meat. It's made up of creamy, soft-cooked eggs (scrambled eggs, prepared very slowly over low heat) spooned onto toast along with whole anchovy fillets or anchovy paste.

The sandwich took off in some of the most elevated places in English society in the early 1900s, such as Oxford University and Parliament. It was served at both institutions' dining halls until the mid-20th century, at which point it faded into obscurity. In the U.S., a version of Scotch woodcock found favor among readers of a 1911 United Daughters of the Confederacy cookbook. Created by Frances Luck of Jackson, Mississippi, the sandwich was served at countless ladies' club luncheons, with the addition of strained tomatoes and melted cheese to the eggs and anchovies.

An Iowan childhood overflows with loose meat sandwiches. It's a fast food staple in many Midwestern states, essentially a hamburger in that it's mostly lightly seasoned ground beef on a bun, and maybe topped with onions, pickles, and/or lettuce, except that the protein isn't presented as a patty — it's a carefully arranged pile of chunks, or "loose meat." Such sandwiches are also known as Maid-Rites, owing to the local dominance of loose meat chain Maid-Rite.

In the late 1950s, Campbell's tried to take the loose meat sandwich national with a variation designed to move units of its canned soups. A 1957 recipe for the Vegetable Souper Burger distributed by Campbell's promised a simple, hearty meal: ground beef and onions, simmered in a can of vegetable soup, ketchup, and mustard, and then all of that heaped onto buns. A later recipe, printed in magazine ads for Campbell's onion soup, subbed out the vegetable soup with that other style, resulting in a tangy, spicy, onion-forward sandwich that resembled a sloppy joe. While loose meat sandwiches remain popular in the Midwest, Campbell's hasn't promoted the eating of Souper Burgers in years.

Who is the "Joe" behind the sloppy Joe? Possibly no one. A heavily sauced variant on the Iowa-style loose meat sandwich, the sloppy Joe likely originated in the 1930s or 1940s — possibly at an Ohio restaurant, or at a bar called Sloppy Joes, either the one in pre-Communism Havana, Cuba, frequented by movie stars, or the one in Key West, Florida. The standard preparation involves dousing browned ground beef in a sauce made from ketchup or tomato sauce, barbecue sauce, brown sugar, and chili powder, and sometimes served with chopped peppers and onions, all on a hamburger bun. The whole thing is a savory but sweet mess that more than earns its name. By the late 1940s, the sloppy joe sandwich was well-known across the United States, and by the 1950s, a common choice among kids and teenagers at school cafeteria lines. Libby's marketed the first sloppy Joe sauce mixture, sold in cans, in the 1950s, and it would eventually be overshadowed by Hunt's Manwich, introduced in 1969.

Associated with young eaters and their unrefined palates, sloppy Joes didn't persist the way other kid food choices and comfort foods like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or macaroni and cheese did. They're passé now, a mid-20th century relic and no longer a cafeteria standard.