a butter and mayonnaise sandwich
Living in the United States we forget that many other countries preserve the tradition of reserving Sunday as a day of rest. This, of course, means that not only do the Monday-Friday set take Sunday for r&r but that shop keepers, restaurant owners and even gas station attendants lock their doors and take the day for themselves.
For this reason, it is unfortunate that my mother and I chose a Sunday to drive to travel through the country towns of South Africa’s Western Cape.
After a morning of driving through towns shut up like the Mississippi coast during a hurricane watch, the notion ran through my head that lunch might be impossibility. (A more pressing need my increasingly urgent longing for a public bathroom.) So when we saw a building, perched on the side of a cliff in the middle of absolutely nowhere, boasting a bookshop, restaurant, wine tasting room and pub—and the doors were wide open—I brought the car to a screeching halt.
There was a small shop with a takeout menu off the side of the restaurant. We sized up the options. It was either a toasted sandwich and a Coke on the run from the shop or sit down for an hour in a restaurant that looked as though it was decorated by Heidi. We went for the sandwich—only instead of selecting from one of the usual suspects like ham and cheese, we decided to split something called a “chicken and mayonnaise” on brown bread. To round out the meal we grabbed a couple of the local apples we’d seen growing for miles on either side of the road, (remember that although the trip was in April, it was the middle of the South African autumn).
When the sandwich was ready, we piled back into the car and my mother set to work splitting the sandwich while I navigated the twisting roads while driving on the left-hand side, a feat that took pretty much all of my attention.
Because I couldn’t take my eyes off of the road, I ate my lunch by feel. The first feeling was bread that was slick with butter; it was so slick with butter, in fact, that it nearly slid right out of my hand and under the accelerator. I took a bite, which tasted… like butter. Another bite, more butter. The third bite I pressed against the roof of my mouth and flicked my tongue between the sliced of bread. A fourth bite smeared a little blob of mayo on my lips. As I continued to eat, my mother was uncharacteristically silent. Finally, when my piece was nearly gone I ventured to comment. “This is a butter and mayonnaise sandwich!”
My mother broke her silence with peels of laughter. She said she thought there was a little chicken in there somewhere, (she did have the advantage of being able to visually examine this strange creation). I asked for another napkin before I imprinted the entire steering wheel with my butter-soaked mitts and commented, “Thank goodness for the apple!,” grateful that it, at least, was a food I could recognize.
at least it was a food I recognized