Leftovers, eaten the day after, or maybe late the night of, are the best part of Thanksgiving. The performance of the big meal is done, the mood has r

The Triumph of the Post-Thanksgiving Sandwich

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2024-11-30 02:00:02

Leftovers, eaten the day after, or maybe late the night of, are the best part of Thanksgiving. The performance of the big meal is done, the mood has relaxed, the more distasteful guests are long gone. You are neither a host nor a guest: you are a person alone with her refrigerator, her appetite, and her creativity. The Thanksgiving-leftovers sandwich is a continuation of the holiday ritual, the festive meal’s third and final act: after preparation and presentation comes a dénouement of sandwichification. Two slices of bread (or a split roll, or a biscuit; let’s not fuss), is nature’s ideal vehicle for leftovers. Cold cuts, after all, were, in their original form, the slices of meat people ate once what remained of a roast had gone cold.

The actual formula of the Thanksgiving dinner—that enormous roast, the bready stuffing, the potatoes, the gravy, a dollop of tart cranberry sauce to cut through the tidal wave of richness—isn’t unique to Thanksgiving. It is the basic foundation of a hearty, celebratory Northern European meal. Think of a plate of Swedish meatballs (meat, potato, gravy, puckery-sweet lingonberry jam) or an English Sunday roast (with lamb and mint jelly). Appropriately for an awfully American holiday, there is something awfully American about assigning a set of broadly seasonal and celebratory recipes to one specific day, collapsing the signifier and the signified: to celebrate Thanksgiving is to eat roast turkey and mashed potatoes; to eat roast turkey and mashed potatoes on any other day of the year is to evoke Thanksgiving.

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