The Old-School Sandwich Trick Everyone Used For Picnics In The 1950s
Who doesn't love a sandwich? If you can't resist throwing something between bread for your picnic basket, you'll be happy to know you're in good historic company. And if you were hosting a picnic back in the mid-20th century, there was one very memorable way to combine multiple sandwiches together into an easy and transportable loaf. The "frosted ribbon sandwich," also known as the "frosted sandwich loaf," was a popular party option in the 1950s, '60s, and even '70s, looking closer to a cake than a sandwich in many ways.
Imagine layers of white bread with different fillings in between, all stacked on top of each other and then covered in cream cheese, mimicking icing. When you sliced into it, you'd find neat, colorful stripes inside, with fillings ranging from simple egg salad to sliced ham or cucumbers and cream cheese. Basically, anything that could be pressed into a tidy and crustless block was liable to find its way into one of these sandwich loaves.
Like many post-war trends, these ribbon sandwiches were all about impressing your neighbors and flexing a little bit. Plus, there was also the sheer convenience of it. You just needed to grab a loaf of bread, cut it into horizontal uniform slices, and then reassemble them with the fillings of your choice. The cream cheese icing seems to be more optional than required, but either way it made a bold centerpiece ... even if these days it mostly lives on through nostalgia.
The ribbon sandwich's origins are as layered as the sandwich itself
Trying to determine a sandwich's exact origins isn't always easy. Such is the case with frosted sandwich loaf. While it's clear that it became popular in post-war America, it shares some characteristics with global sandwich traditions that are even older.
In the United Kingdom, there's the tradition of British afternoon tea, a custom that dates back a century earlier to the mid-19th century. If you've ever prepared the bread for tea sandwiches, you know they are also crustless, neatly trimmed, and all about presentation. So, a similar concept, just not quite as ostentatious or transportable. A more likely gastronomic connection is smörgåstårta, the savory sandwich cakes that first delighted Swedish palates in the 1930s. Smörgåstårtor are made from bread layers and creamy fillings, and look comparable to the frosted loaf that would appear across the Atlantic a few decades later.
Whether the ribbon sandwich loaf is the result of Nordic sandwich cakes meeting British tea traditions and America's postwar culture of entertaining is anyone's guess. Still, no matter how you slice it, this is one complex dish. And yet, some people are more than happy to leave it in the past.