The Cube Rule of Food Identification (2017)
cuberule.com
cuberule.com
Similarly, a bagel with cream cheese (that is, both halves of the bagel sandwiching cream cheese) is not a sandwich (despite the use of the word "sandwiching" in the definition), but a bagel with turkey inside is a sandwich.
I'm comfortable without a definition, though I look forward to hearing the reports of the intrepid theoreticians that can yield definitions that satisfy these criteria, much as I laud the efforts of the adjective-ordering folk in descriptive grammar.
My rule of thumb is that if I went into a restaurant and asked the waiter "I want a sandwich, but I don't care what kind -- surprise me!" and they brought me an object, how angry would I be at the waiter who brought me that object.
If I asked for a melt but didn't care what kind, then I feel like the possibilities expand, and would include a regular grilled cheese.
Even if you take grilled cheese narrowly enough that it must have nothing but cheese between the bread, there are a fairly wide array of potential breads and potential cheeses and combinations of cheeses that there is definitely more than one sandwich that fits the description, even before considering that, in use, “grilled cheese” allows for additional ingredients.
The conversation could go like this, "I'll have a grilled cheese" -- "What kind of cheese?" -- "surprise me" -- "What kind of bread?" -- "surprise me" -- "Do you want tomato or bacon or any other meats?". At this point I'd have to stop and figure out which way I wanted to go. But that's reasonable because these are non-default options; if I asked for a surprise sandwich and the waiter asked me "is open-faced okay" or "is ice cream sandwich okay" or "is a wrap okay" then I'd totally accept that as a clarification, but without that clarification none of those would be acceptable.
Cheese on Toast is, by its very name, where the cheese is on the toast. An open-faced grilled cheese if you will.
In the UK it is known as "grilled cheese sandwich" or perhaps "toasted cheese sandwich".
EDIT: TFA is talking about a grilled-cheese sandwich; i.e. a toasted cheese sandwich.
Only then can we know the truth.
Isn't that still prescriptivism? Descriptivism here would mean noting what people claim constitutes sandwichhood, and maybe noting what people's behavior reveals about what they actually do or don't treat as a sandwich. But it would be prescriptivist to assert a new definition of sandwichhood, even if you argue that it's somehow more motivated than others.
A prescriptivist says that a pronoun should match the number, gender, and human-ness of its antecedent, and therefore “they” is not acceptable when referring to a single person. A casual descriptivist says that they understand what it means when other people use “they” in a singular fashion, and find that it is a useful construct. A formal descriptivist would try to describe how the usage and clarity is practically evolving over time. The terms “pronoun” and “antecedent” are terms themselves modeled from actual usage, rather than some organizing committee that decided how English should work.
Similarly for sandwich definition. The descriptivist viewpoint says that no strict definition is necessary; that people have a casual understanding and should model their usage on that. A prescriptivist says “here is a definition of ‘sandwich’ that models a significant number of things that many people agree are sandwiches, so we expand that definition and use that to label things as sandwich or not sandwich, regardless of the common understanding”.
The key point here is that I do not feel a strict definition is necessary in order to reasonably discuss sandwich labeling.
Practically speaking, I have found that my heuristic above generally yields agreement from others (in particular, I have not yet found anyone who would be happy with a hot dog under those circumstances), with occasional differences of opinion that would be interesting for a professional sandwichologist to examine as a question of sandwichial drift over time.
Or put differently: if reality and models differ, a descriptivist says that the models are wrong, while a prescriptivist says that reality is wrong.
Breakfast cereal: Soup, or not?
I mean, if they gave me gazpacho or a cold melon soup I also would not be thrilled, but I would not accuse them of violating the conditions that I had laid out.
Despite the fact that you're clearly a mental patient who thinks that a bagel with some meat inside can be a sandwich, you have my upvote for that line:-)
Seriously, though, that's actually a pretty good criterion. Reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart's comment about knowing it when he sees it: if I ask for X, someone gives me Y & I'm angry, then Y is not in the class of X to a degree directly correlated with my anger at the result. I dig it!
What if instead of cream cheese it is a slice of lettuce, some cheese, and some mayo, for a veggie sandwich?
Remove the lettuce, now what?
Does lettuce, green colored water, define it as a sandwich? Or is it the presence of a solid type of cheese versus spreadable? Is brie + lettuce in a bagel a sandwich while brie alone is not?
Remove the cheese, just leave the mayo. Now what? Add back in the lettuce (say the eater is lactose intolerant), does it become a sandwich again?
I’ll go ahead and stop you here; no, what you have is not a sandwich. By which I guess I mean that it is not an unqualified sandwich in the same sense that an open-faced sandwich is not a sandwich. If I directly ordered either nobody would think me odd, or if the waiter asked me “is a veggie sandwich okay” I wouldn’t think him crazy. Oddly enough, a grilled cheese would be fine as an unqualified sandwich.
I’ll turn this around and ask you to do the thought experiment. If you were the waiter at a lunch counter and someone ordered a sandwich and said they didn’t care what kind, would you give them a veggie sandwich, playing the odds? Would you as a customer feel okay getting that response? Or another similar thought experiment of your own devising where you would feel comfortable with that usage?
> Would you as a customer feel okay getting that response?
I've had some great veggie sandwiches, the one I described above wasn't a great example, it was purposefully minimalist to prove a point.
Shove some sliced grilled eggplant on there and it'd all be good.
And how in the world are you OK with a grilled cheese being a sandwich but if someone pokes a hole in the bread and uses cream cheese it now is no longer a sandwich?
Is a grilled cheese sandwich with a circular hole cut out of the center a sandwich? What if it isn't grilled? I'm trying to understand where is the line is here!
I've had perfectly fine veggie sandwiches, when I've ordered vegetarian sandwiches, but that wasn't my question -- would you, personally, consider that to be a reasonable response if you went into a random restaurant, or if you were asked to prepare a sandwich for a customer who said they didn't care what kind of sandwich?
I'm not asking rhetorically -- I'm genuinely curious. People do differ on this; many people I talk to disagree on the bagel question, and consider both variants a sandwich or consider neither one a sandwich. My theory here is that I grew up eating bagels at home and not at restaurants, so would eat my bagels with cream cheese open faced, and not sandwiched between the two halves, so I never really created the association with being a sandwich; while people who consider it a sandwich grew up in cities where you got a bagel from a store or deli, where it is pretty much universally served with the two halves stacked, and thus is more sandwich-like during developmental years.
Would you feel comfortable, without knowing the customer, giving them such a minimalist veggie sandwich and still expect that they would be satisfied that you've obeyed the broad parameters?
My experience, anecdotally, is that given the rule of thumb above and similar thought experiments, there is not a lot of variation in the practical usage of the word sandwich.
Opposition mainly comes from people who attempt to apply an arbitrary rule and are not willing to revise that rule to match their own usage for the sake of the argument. In other words, overthinking. Or a pathological case of Occam’s razor.
"Moral particularism is the view that there are no moral principles and that moral judgement can be found only as one decides particular cases, either real or imagined." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_particularism
What does a beef Wellington count as? It has multiple nested layers... what if you made a turducken and wrapped each bird in a flatbread of some kind, before stuffing it in a larger bird?
Though the whole topic is a mess: an open-faced sandwich suddenly is a self-dual food.
It seems we might slip from group theory to category theory. At which point we are surely describing the structure of meta-sandwiches (in that they sandwich various definitions of sandwichness between each other)
> Still, just as we cannot give a final, essential definition of ‘game’, so we cannot find “what is common to all these activities and what makes them into language or parts of language” (PI 65).
> There is no reason to look, as we have done traditionally—and dogmatically—for one, essential core in which the meaning of a word is located and which is, therefore, common to all uses of that word. We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (PI 66).
This is untenable. It's part of the identity of certain words that they change meaning, but that's the exception. In all other cases you can find a center of mass, so to speak, although describing that with fever words than the word you try to describe is mostly impossible. I need to be able to reject when somebody talks bullshit, like Wittgenstein does there, professionally.
It'd be nice to have some formal process for deciding what's bullshit and what's not. But, it doesn't seem to actually. exist in any objective sense. The words that make the most sense to you are your own. And everyone else always kinda seems like they're full of bullshit.
Recently, some companies here have started making classic hotdogs. But I never understood why - "sausage in a roll" is so much superior topology (for eating on the run). On the contrary, I don't understand why Americans won't adopt "sausage in a roll" instead.
For a traditional hot dog, though, the key thing is the toppings. Some American styles, like the Coney Island dog, can have as much topping as there is hot dog.
Pretzel dogs and bagel dogs also exist; they sound pretty close to what OP was talking about.
http://czechoutchannel.blogspot.com/2007/05/wenceslas-square...
I remember getting American-style buns and the rolls that you're referring to. I prefer the American-style buns because when you take a bite from the roll version, the excess sauce drips out the other side, whereas you can maneuver an American-style bun such that it doesn't drip.
The fun part, is that in theory, the klobasniky came from the Czech via the kolache, and then came back to Czech republic from Texas filled with meat. =)
Some others (fried onions, etc) get put in with a long spoon before the sausage.
Interestingly both Germany and Poland have something similar but under different names. The German version was invented by a government food research center in an attempt to replicate Western foods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketwurst -- so you are right in that the top DDR food scientists also agree about the ideal hotdog shape!
For quite a while, fast food in Denmark was all about a mobile "sausage stand" (the permissions to which were interestingly given preferably to those who could not have a full time job).
I really enjoy this kind of "ridiculous topic" + "hyper-analysis" humor.
All you have to do is misunderstand the genre of something and then review it as that. I need a YouTube channel about this.
A narrower related field is Taxonomy, the practice and science of classification.
I like the "cube rule" as a very coarse grained way of classifying food! Classifications of things can become pretty crazy, in particular when they try to classify very general and dissimilar things (example, the schema.org vocabulary [1]).
Now someone should turn the cube rule to an OWL vocabulary so machines too, like we humans, can understand the difference between a hot dog and a salad [2].
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology
As a non-sandwich example of the same phenomenon, consider whether or not an item is considered to be furniture. A few items are universally considered to be furniture: beds, couches, desks, wardrobes. These items together form a semantic boundary, but that boundary is not necessarily uniform. Having legs certainly matters, but not all furniture has legs. Being not easily movable matters, but chairs are easily moved and if couches are furniture, so are chairs. Likewise, items which are not movable at all, such as shelves built into the wall may not be furniture depending on who you ask. Appliances have electronics, and appliances could be considered a special category of furniture, or simply not be considered furniture. Some people would classify lamps as furniture, but not televisions.
The issue is that semantic boundaries are not symmetrical. Having features which differ from our platonic ideals and our prototypical example of the category are not weighted equally. Some features matter more, and all of those features together form a gestalt of sandwichness. An attempt to form hard and fast rules about which features are necessary to be a sandwich are well-meaning, but ultimately incorrect as they fail to appreciate the psychology of the sandwich, what it means to hold the concept of a sandwich in your head.
The one with the most possibility is two starch faces, as in (2), but the starch faces share an edge.
Also, the site indicates that a whole double-crust pie is a calzone, while a slice of double-crust pie is a taco. Having food categories change as they are served and consumed seems fundamentally unstable and can lead only to chaos. The single slice could easily pass through three or four stages during consumption alone! I think a food's category must be fixed at the end of preparation, for the sake of all sanity.
(Is an uncut bagel a Toast or an "air" Sushi?)
If I were arguing for this rule, though, I'd say that the unlisted combinations should collapse to the listed ones based on curvature. {side,bottom} collapses to either Toast or Taco, and {side,back,bottom} collapses to any of Toast, Quiche, or Taco.
Furthermore, there doesn’t have to be a consistent set of rules defining what is and what is not a sandwich.
Arguing about it is fun, though.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA4gF5KrboK2m2Xu7/how-an-alg...
If you put schmear/spread/sauce on the bread, it's a sandwich.
If you put schmear/spread/sauce on the "meat", it's not a sandwich.
The distinction is that in the latter, the bread is just a vessel to get "meat" into your mouth. In the former, the bread is part of the whole package.
But on the other hand, my wife likes to troll me by calling buttered toast a "butter sandwich", so maybe some rigor in our definitions would do my life some good.
Effector/manipulator on the world? Data interface with keyboard/mouse? Surrogate life partner?
> Some crepes.
Crepes are not trivial to classify: obviously a plain flat crepe with some topping is a toast, a "walkaround" (usually sweet) crepe is a quiche and sushi/wrap crepes exist (e.g. galette-saucisse[0]) but what about the "complète" where the crèpe is folded back on the filling but not entirely? Functionally it's closer to a calzone or a toast (it's not eaten from the "opening") but technically it looks more like a quiche.
and real mexican tacos are too
Fiddling about with adjectives is about as useful as saying that squares are not rectangles or rhombuses because otherwise they would be called rhomboid rectangles or rectangular rhombuses.
The hot dog is a special case of a sausage submarine sandwich.
The tweet screenshot from @Phosphatide has Japanese along the top, so I'm assuming that's why the immediate reference was sushi.
Thats a taco
It turns into a salad when it falls apart
They are easier to split.
Personally I found insight in yebyen's words of wisdom:
> obviously, a steak is a salad, and soup is a wet salad
Also, mashed potatoes are a salad, and salad in a bread bowl is a quiche.
Super-sets/classes - A calzone is still a sandwich since it implements the sandwich class (distinct bread on two sides of a food; which could be an additional slice of bread. E.G. Folding a slice of bread over half of a different slice of bread can be a sandwich. However making an S-curve does not cause a distinct middle layer (though if the edges are sliced off suddenly it is). ).
Huh? A calzone has the same bread on every side, not distinct bread on two sides. It's a single bread wrapped around a filling.
While this may be topologically consistent, it’s not useful as a taxonomy to have foods dynamically change categorization as you serve or eat them.
I think that would be crucial to determine the precise meaning. I'm very much against either extreme, pre- or description, but I find that expanding the sample space back to include historic meaning may yield results able to satisfy both sides.
Maybe I can still help out. We are actually talking about the club sandwich. Club sandwich could be, for all I know, which is very little about the club sandwiches history, cognate to Ger. "Klappstulle" (a 2-sandwich [to use the OP's typology] made by folding a slice over) at least the club part, and both could go all the way back to the Proto Indo European root whence glue (to stick together) compare Ger. "Kleber" (glue), "Kleie" (wheat-paste?), and perhaps Old English and Gothic "hlaif" (bread) then most likely in reference to dough, Ger. "klumpen" - 'clump', 'glob'. A club of people sticks together. The swinging and clubbing club could perhaps compare to 'key' (from Lt. clavis, from a sense nail, peg, hook), as stick, sticky and clavis, claudo show similar relations. "Klappe" means 'hatch', 'shutter', 'mouth', we say something "klappt nicht" (doesn't function), "(um)klappen" ... it's baffling that there's no good translation: The lid of box is a "Klappe", and closing it shut is "zuklappen"; A "klappe" that doesn't shut tight, flaps and makes noise, that noise is called "klappern" and from that all kinds of 'to make noise' "klappern"; Best fit would be 'clamp'. Now it depends at which time, if there was a relation at all, our dinners aligned or diverged. But, since you can't take a Hot Dog to work and eat it later--already cold--it cannot be a club sandwich, at least if folding is done primarily to stack and wrap them without making a mess of it. Well, I made a mess of it, I didn't check references on most my claims, but I'll have to wrap it up.
As a working hypothesis I suppose "sand" relates to Ger. "Kanten", the thick end of a loaf, related to "Kante" (edge), but its Greek root has no secure origin so a link to the celtic word for rim, tire giving "waybread" or "wagonbread" (cp. Ger. "Weg" - way; "Wegebrot") is not too promising. It's just, I have that image of the thick end bread as a happy hobo's ration very present from cartoons. But a better candidate would relate to butter perhaps. Or how about "Shank", cog. Ger. "Schinken" (ham), "Schenkel" (thighs), as something two sided, angled. Anyone reminded of John Connery? That's ridiculous. How about "to send for" - Ger. "gemachte Brote". I mean, there was a time and place where ... wasn't common and bread had been eaten raw or at least separately (... "Belag" - topping, coating).
[1] Wiki Commons has a picture of a ca. 8000 years old specimen in the form of a Spitzwecke https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Spitzweck_Reko_Oveg%C3%B...
[2] from Latin canthus (“tire, edge of a wheel”), from Ancient Greek κανθός (kanthós, “corner of the eye, tire, etc.”). The Greek is not certain, maybe from Celtic or if that seems implausible not Indo European.
[3] While I don't like anyone prescribing as if they were they majesty, I still dislike the descriptive approach that labels anything as correct that randomly comes up in the mash up of dialects. I'm especially weary of misunderstandings becoming fashionable.
On the other hand, the look and feel of hardtack (which cannot be Tolkiens waybread if that's brown on the outside and creamy on the inside) and zwieback pretty much reminds of sand. And they might sell it to ships leaving port. That doesn't quite figure with how we know a sandwhich today, but sure enough, there are other roots that can derive "sand-".
At any rate, placenames lend much better and hence more often to food names. And placenames in turn have often been related to milling and possibly mill-derivatives; to biblical proportions--cf. Bethlehem--which, again, may mean that bread words overlap with more figurative meanings; compare "sound" (healthy), from PIE reconstruction *swent-~sunt- (vigor); Then compare vigor and -wich ... Townsville might sound redundant, but there it is.
It isn’t good to see large communities of humans burning mental calories to come to the same set of conclusions (I’m on team sandwich because $REASON | I’m on team taco because $REASON). It is a mental D.o.s. directed towards humans that tend towards herding.