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Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

> The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types

This is 2022 - you can get old cookbooks from archive.org and check if Nathan was right.

He wasn't.

For example, "The up-to-date sandwich book : 400 ways to make a sandwich", by Eva Greene Fuller. Published in Chicago in 1909. https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/n7/m...

Or, a generation earlier in 1884, the book "Salads and Sauces" by Thomas Jefferson Murrey (New York) has a chapter on sandwiches. https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... including "Apple Sandwich", "Anchovy Sandwich", "Beef, Raw, Sandwich", "Brie Sandwich", "Caviare Sandwich", "Clam Sandwich", "Curry Sandwich", "Dandelion Sandwich", "Duck Sandwich", and so on for several more pages, ending with "Welsh Sandwich". Look under "Goose Liver" for the foie gras entry.

I hope I helped save your meal!

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Before the internet existed you could just say things confidently and nobody could check if you were right. Nowadays you check the internet and there's 100 blog posts backing up the lie. What a time to be alive.

And for each of those blog posts, several others refuting them.

and that's before we get to the comments

This entire thread is comments. ;)

All the world's a comment section, and we are merely commentators

To comment, or not to comment. That is the question.

It was a comment written by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Now is the Eternal September of our discontent.

Is this a comment box which I see before me, the submit button toward my hand?

I, personally, strive to be an uncommon tater.

Tuber or not tuber, that is the question.

A caviare sandwich sounds like a really expensive "sloppy joe."

"sloppy roe"

Depends on the caviar. In Sweden caviare made with salt cod roe is a cheap and popular sandwich spread.

I believe at the time caviar only meant sturgeon roe.

The aforementioned recipe from https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... says:

> Caviare is the roe of the sturgeon prepared under many formulas, the Russian being the best. Take a teaspoonful of caviare, put it in a soup-plate ; add to it a saltspoonful of chopped onion, a walnut of butter, and the juice of half a lemon ; work well together, spread on thin slices of rye-bread, press them together, cut the sandwich in two, and serve. Americans as a class do not like caviare.

According to Wikipedia, 1 salt spoon (ssp) = 0.25 teaspoon.

The other recipe book has caviare-lobster sandwich (species unspecified; I assume sturgeon), roe sandwich (salt herring), and two types of shad-roe sandwiches (shad). See https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/12/m... .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caviar mentions:

> In Scandinavia, a type of sandwich spread is available, made from smoked cod roe and other ingredients, which is referred to as smörgåskaviar (meaning "sandwich caviar"). Outside Scandinavia, the product is referred to as creamed smoked roe or in French as Caviar de Lysekil.

Perhaps the Swedish term "kaviar" doesn't overlap fully with the English term "caviar"?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaviar#Swedish says:

  1. caviar (roe of the sturgeon)
  2. creamed smoked roe, Scandinavian sandwich caviar

while https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caviar#Noun says:

  1. Roe of the sturgeon or of certain other large fish, considered a delicacy.
  2. (figuratively) Something whose flavour is too fine for the vulgar taste.

I think it is a joke on the "there are only 5 story types" blather you hear, every so often.

Yes, there are only two story types.

+ Someone goes on a journey.

+ A stranger comes to town.

That's just one story from two perspectives though?

Two faces of the hero?

Conclusively proving that the hero is a gemini.

It’s the Langrangian vs Eulerian specification of fiction

This is only true if you define journey as basically doing anything interesting. But then you are just saying that the only story type is “someone does something”.

There's only one story type. Somebody runs into a problem and tries to solve it, but fails at the halfway mark because they didn't understand the problem well enough. They rethink the problem and try to solve it again, but fail at the 3/4 mark because they don't understand themselves. Then they defeat the problem by gaining understanding of themselves (or fail to defeat the problem because of a willful refusal to change, or have a partial/late revelation and a partial/late success.) Problem > failure of vision > failure of character > solution.

Stories are attached to particular protagonists, but you can do things like overlap the stories of multiple protagonists or give a single protagonist multiple overlapping stories in order to develop narratives of arbitrary complexity.

> There's only one story type

One type, yes, and Kishōtenketsu as well. And now you know.

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