(And thus perfectly acceptable to eat for lunch)
Can’t believe this isn’t already here…
We don’t have this problem in Australia, where a sandwich is narrowly understood as being between two slices of bread cut from a loaf.
If it’s on a bread roll it’s not a sandwich it’s a roll. If it’s on a burger bun it’s not a sandwich it’s a burger. A sub is not a sandwich, it’s a sub. A hot dog cannot be considered a sandwich, nor could a cake or anything else that’s clearly not a sandwich.
What about a burger on toasted bread slices?
So if you put peanut butter and jelly between hamburger buns, it’s a burger?
No, it’s an abomination. But also yes.
✅ Cream cheese on banana bread
Got it.
Get the fuck out! I am not making you a cottage cheese pastrami sandwich on banana bread! That would severely damage my reputation.
Let me ask you a question: how do you feel about frilly toothpicks?
Yep, drives me nuts when they call burgers sandwiches. If you gotta classify them together, call them handhelds.
Pizza is technically an open-faced sandwich, but it’s still pizza.
What about Turkish bread?
Yes, and?
Nordic (or Finnish/Swedish at least) “sandwich cake”.
Is cake bread though?
Sandwich cake is already a term that means the same thing as layer cake. The classic combination of two layers of Victoria sponge with strawberry jam and whipped cream in between is called a Victoria Sandwich. Anyone arguing that a layer cake isn’t a sandwich is just illiterate, not a defender of semantic specificity.
I’ve never heard of anyone putting jelly/jam on cake and now I want to try it.
My spouse makes one that way that everyone we know goes wild about. Literally just yellow cake, cooked strawberries, and homemade whipped cream. We’re both baffled by how popular it is, but I guess the Midwest isn’t used to real whipped cream.
I’d say most Americans aren’t used to real whipped cream in general lol. Just the other week, I went to a Harry Potter-themed birthday party for who is essentially my niece and my brother made a British recipe for whipped cream for the butterbeer slushies we made. It was thick as hell and pretty damn good.
Oh that sounds amazing!
The butterbeer was literally cream soda with a small leveled spoonful of butterscotch per can. Then we had a slushie machine then we put it in and it came out perfect.
One of my favorite cakes is a chocolate traditional cake and frosting but the inner layer is raspberry jam. It’s so good.
Congratulations on your sudden literacy (?).
Cereal is soup
lasagna is a sandwich.
Cakes predate the Earl of Sandwich so really a sandwich is a subset of cake
OBJECTION!
How can a sandwich be a cake if cakes are sweet and sandwiches are salty?
Pb&j?
<starts sweating>
Sandwiches predates him as well.
I feel like that’s more a case for converging evolution than relationship. That actually makes this easier to deal with though.
If the cake layers don’t get your fingers messy and don’t crumble when you hold it, I’ll allow it. It also has to be small enough to be able to take a bite out of all the layers at once.
More importantly than having bread on the outside is being handheld.
Yes, you can eat anything with your hands, but cake is typically a fork food.
In my house most baked goods are eaten without a fork, one small sliver/square at a time, while standing at the counter and repeatedly saying, “I’m just going to have one small bite.”
If cake is a sandwich then a loaf of sliced bread is a sandwich.
It’s a stack of bread sandwiches- where the number of sandwiches is:
total number of slices / 3
Never had a bread sandwich I see
Once could, if so inclined, put cake between two slices of bread. It’d be hard to argue that’s not a sandwich.
Is that the definition of a sandwich, or is there something about ‘sanwhich’ that transcends its constituent parts? Could ‘sandwich’ be a cluster of different properties that, when considered as a whole, become ‘sandwhich’? I think to get to the heart of this ‘sandwhich’ question, we need not look at the sandwhich but instead at ‘cake’. What is ‘cake’ and do those propertie exclude sandwhich? What common aspects do cake and sandwhich have, and are both of those elements essential?
Words aren’t isomorphic to their dictionary definitions—words had commonly-accepted meanings long before the existence of dictionaries. Dictionary definitions are just an attempt to come up with a heuristic for identifying things as instances of the term in question, but they’re never perfect—and the real-world usage is ontologically prior.
If the dictionary definition of sandwich fails to distinguish cakes from sandwiches, it’s just an imperfect definition (like all definitions are)—and we can leave it at that.
Alright, so is a cake a sandwich?
Bread pudding is a brown sugar sandwitch.
