Miracle Whip Sandwich

My mother's go-to sandwich for sending me off to kindergarten.

My first memory of food and eating is from when I was in kindergarten. I obviously ate food before that. And as someone who grew up on a farm, I can reliably guess what my diet consisted of prior to this first memory of the act of eating. My diet likely consisted of meat and potatoes. A boiled vegetable. Probably home-canned peaches. Likely some ice cream.

Yes, I grew up on a farm. No, it’s not the farm you are picturing in your mind with rolling meadows and happy sheep. No trim, bearded dad who has a penchant for treating Mother Earth as he himself would want to be treated. No happy smiling mom with ruddy cheeks and a twinkle in her eye. I grew up on a commercial farm, not a gentleman’s farm. And certainly not an organic farm. Not a small farm that produced for local markets. I grew up on a farm 500 acres large  – mostly owned land, some rented, on the North Fork of Long Island. We grew potatoes. Cabbage. Cauliflower. Hay. Some small patches of squashes here and there. Maybe some corn. Not sweet corn. Field corn. The corn you feed to your livestock, the kind you couldn’t cook and eat for yourselves and survive on even if you were in a Zombie Apocalypse.

And we had some animals, too. Some cows and pigs, the odd goat, some sheep, and a whole lot of chickens and ducks and maybe a goose or two. We made butter—correction, my mother made the butter. And we drank fresh milk—“skim milk” meaning the milk that had the cream taken off the top. Imagine my grimace when I first tasted commercial skim milk at school. We ate fresh eggs, too. We ate our own garden’s sweet corn—from stalk to plate in 10 minutes or less. There’s nothing better than corn season.

We smoked and cured and roasted our own animals—their names often scribbled on the side of the white paper that kept them preserved in the deep freeze. “Bucky tastes like he had a little too much grain in his diet,” mom or dad would say about a beloved beef animal we had unearthed from the freezer that morning.

What we didn’t have was fresh kale. No fresh lettuce. No fresh greens. Fresh carrots? Nope (I get that, carrots are hard to grow in some soils). We didn’t do organic. We didn’t bake bread. But we preserved, we corned, we canned and we froze what we had to last through the coming cool seasons until the next round of harvests came along 11 months later. What we had to sustain us was adjacent to what we grew, and what we grew were crops that could be grown and harvested and shipped off to somewhere else on a large-ish scale. Fingerling potatoes? Who has that equipment to harvest those precious things? Brussels sprouts? Too labor intensive. And don’t even bring up daikon, or celery root, or Swiss chard.

Oh gosh, I love chard. And I love kale. And herbs … all the fresh herbs. I never experienced fresh herbs and never really used them in cooking until I was in my mid 30s. My parents were the products of the Great Depression. You grew nothing, you ate nothing that couldn’t be preserved or shipped fresh and held for market with little handling and a lot of shade.

I am the seventh of six children. Funny, I’ve never thought of it that way until just this minute. My parents, bless them, lost a child—third in the birth order—when she was just three months old. Twelve years and three children later—six years between me and Child #6—I came along. A generation different from my oldest sibling. Two generations separated from my parents, and essentially a whole different family. I may be the last of six, but I felt more like an only child.

As the last of six kids—and the last by quite a few years—I spent a good amount of time with my mother. She was older. She was overworked. My mom had a lot going on. She had one child married and pregnant and another she needed to help dress in the morning and send off to school. That’s tough for a normal family. Now throw in the farming responsibilities—the harvesting, the canning, the meal prep, the constant watching and waiting on the family.

With all of that going on—the responsibilities and expectations—no wonder she would present me with a mayonnaise sandwich for lunch before I stepped on the bus for afternoon kindergarten. It was an easy-to-prepare pre-school lunch for a kid. And it wasn’t just any ordinary mayo, either. It was Miracle Whip, a salad dressing, not really marketed as a “mayo.” For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Miracle Whip, it’s no ordinary egg-and-oil mayonnaise. It’s sweet. Other differences? It’s sweet. That’s really all I can discern at the moment. And as a kindergartner, it was the preferred sandwich spread. Not like I had a choice. It was my mother’s preferred white food at the time, and still is. God bless her.

Miracle Whip Sandwich

Ingredients

• One slice of a Pullman-style white bread, preferably a store-brand riff on Wonder Bread

• Miracle Whip. No substitutions accepted.

Instructions

1. Using a knife, spread a thin layer of Miracle Whip over the slice of bread. Be sure to remove extra spread and return to Miracle Whip jar.

2. Cut bread slice in half, inverting one half onto the other.

3. Serve 30 minutes before the bus is scheduled to pick up your child for afternoon kindergarten class.

Options:

• Use hummus, baba ghanoush or an alternative spread.

• Layer thinly sliced cheese, turkey or other deli meat onto the bread before slicing.

• Add thinly sliced roasted vegetables—eggplant, zucchini, peppers, etc.

• Grill the bread (cheese, meat and veg optional) before serving.

• Consider a side of carrots, chips or salad.