Sometimes I feel we’ve gone to such extremes in food, a plain ham and cheese sandwich on white bread has become subversive. No bacon. No fancy mustards or mortadella. No special greens or chutneys or spices. No food stuffs stuffed inside other food stuffs and then stuffed between a doughnut and a grilled gruyere and pimento Texas-toast sandwich—just a plain-old boring, comforting, ham and cheese on white bread. Hell, go wild and cut off the crust.
It’s not that I don’t love the excitement of a fatty flavor bomb that makes my eyes roll back in my head while I emit plaintive yummy noises. In fact, I’m all for it. I love the dishes that make you want to clutch your heart preemptively—those marvels of modern cuisine that would put my doctor’s children through college (if I had one). But when you’ve spent too much time on the fringes, abusing the limits of your senses, sometimes vanilla can seem like the most decadent choice to make.
At least this was my thought process after scrolling through the wonders at Insanewiches.com, a site offering the food porn equivalent of bondage fetish.
Why bondage? Because, through the use of artful manipulation, the creators have forced the constituent ingredients to submit to the will of the master. Also, much like bondage, these are not necessarily sandwiches you’d want to attempt to make at home without serious planning, lest you injure yourself or others. Somewhere between Harmony Concepts and Mapplethorpe, at least Insanewiches.com is tasteful.
Most of the insanewiches are to sandwiches as the foam and fondant confections of extreme bakers are to cakes. Some look simply impossible to pull off, like Japanese rope play.
Others look obscene, off-putting, and yet completely tempting—the kind of sandwiches that can lead one to question their own food morality.
For me, Insanewiches.com works best as a fleeting Internet dalliance. A place to be shocked and titillated. But in the end, the extremes make me realize how often I take the simple things for granted. Those wonderfully constant simple things, like ham and cheese on white bread.
Yeesh. Maybe you should go back to writing beer cliches.