ENTRY 02: 09/24/2023 - On The Nature of Soups & Sandwiches

Now, stop me if this is half-baked, but what’s the deal with soups & sandwiches? I’m specifically referring to the combination of the two, not both separately. It seems like every restaurant I’ve visited serves soups in conjunction with sandwiches, it’s practically ubiquitous. Today I had a soup and a sandwich for lunch, partly because I wanted to test the nature of this pairing, but also because we happened to have turkey for dinner last night, and I felt like I needed an excuse to make a turkey sandwich. I shall hereby report my findings:

My immediate conclusion upon finishing my - admittedly delicious - meal is that soups are an odd thing to pair with a sandwich. It’s not like they’re a bad idea to pair together, far from it, it’s just… my understanding is that when you pair two foods together, they’re supposed to mutually reinforce each other somehow. Think cookies and milk, those two are good on their own, but shine in combination with each other as the milk softens and infuses the crumbly cookie.

In the cases of soups and sandwiches, however, you’re basically just eating two different meals, alternating between them at random intervals. They’re both good, but neither reinforces the other. They don’t collaborate at all, they’re both running different projects. That’s not to say they clash, far from it. It’s just that neither really interacts with the other at all, apart from lending further nutritional content, as well as an alternative thing to eat to break up any monotony that focusing on just one might bring. Then again, maybe that’s the point?

It’s also possible that I executed soup & sandwich incorrectly. Maybe people are out there dipping their sandwich into the soup? But that strikes me as a bad idea on its face, the already soft bread would become soggy and wet, reducing its structural integrity and making it an overall unpleasant experience to hold the sandwich. On top of that, you’d end up with soggy bread fragments in your soup, which I suppose isn’t the worst, given that many soups have noodles in them, which are essentially soggy bread fragments already.

Hey, maybe people are actually using toasted sandwiches? If they take the dipping route, a toasted sandwich is rigid enough to hold together while moistened, and probably has similar absorbent properties to crackers, an essential piece of soup-eating equipment. I know that French onion soups tend to come with a crusty piece of bread, maybe that’s in a similar vein? But then, I don’t think those are toasted, per se.

My investigations have only yielded more questions. Someday, I shall divine the nature of soups & sandwiches as a dish, but today is not that day.