Sloppy Joes come with many origin stories and names

Monday Munch offers a food with fascinating lore. Theories about the origins and content of the sloppy Joe sandwich abound. Wikipedia has a description, complete with Erroll Flynn, Ernest Hemingway, Adam Sandler on SNL and more.

In the 1995 movie “It Takes Two,” the character eating a sloppy Joe for the first time calls it a “big, gooey, messy burger.” Others call it a Spanish hamburger, hamburg à la creole, toasted deviled hamburger and lots more.

In Quebec, you can find pain à la viande and pain fourré gumbo — stewed ground-beef sandwiches served on hot dog buns. In Brazil, a buraco quente sandwich is ground beef in a pão francês bread roll.

Some say this sandwich originated in Cuba, but Marilyn Brown, director of the consumer test kitchen at H.J. Heinz in Pittsburgh, says their research suggests that the sloppy Joe’s origins lie with the “loose meat sandwiches” sold in Sioux City, Iowa, in the 1930s, the creation of a cook named Joe.

By the 1960s, this hamburger mixture was available in cans, but this sloppy Joe by Libby’s TV ad fails to make it look appetizing.

Nonetheless, you’ll find Sloppy Joe in a can at Shelburne Market, Hannaford, and Shaw’s, with Shaw’s offering half a dozen varieties, paired with Wonder Bread hamburger rolls.

Leave it to New Jersey to be different. The South Orange, New Jersey sloppy Joe refers to a no-cook double-decker sandwich combining two meats, Swiss cheese, coleslaw and Russian dressing on rye bread.

Here’s access to The New York Times’ “An Ode to Sloppy Joe, a Delicious Mess”.

In “Sloppy Joseph,” an episode of the murder-mystery, comedy-drama television series “Poker Face,” Charlie Cale, a woman with the ability to detect if people are lying, finds herself in the kitchen of a private school cafeteria doling out sloppy Joes to students before she solves the mystery of a dead gerbil. Here’s a detailed review.

Any mention of school cafeteria reminds me of my first teaching job in a Brooklyn high school trying to integrate. A cop in full uniform was posted in our cafeteria as angry parents marched and yelled outside. For me, that cafeteria remains a lasting symbol of the complexity of expecting schools to solve society’s woes.

Clearly, just what their food choices might reveal about our nation’s leaders is open to opinion. From hoe cakes to squirrel stew to jellybeans to chili, there’s a great variety. Sticking with sandwiches, a Franklin D. Roosevelt favorite was grilled cheese. Vice-president Hubert Humphrey’s favorite sandwich was quite a combo: peanut butter, bologna, cheddar cheese, lettuce and mayonnaise on toasted bread with catsup on the side.

For the first-ever White House barbecue on the West Terrace, LBJ’s meal featured burgers, along with black-eyed peas and tapioca pudding.

George W. Bush’s favorite snack food wasn’t a sandwich. A writer for The Guardian concludes that “a regular person would not be able to choke this down”.

The New York Times’ fulsome description of what president-elect Jimmy Carter liked to eat included the fact that he plucked his own ducks.

Here’s SNL on Bill Clinton at McDonald’s.

“Dinner with the President: Food, Politics and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House” by Alex Prud’homme describes Michelle Obama and a group of fifth graders sowing seeds from eight varieties of lettuces, as well as radishes, peas, carrots, spinach, kale, chard, collard greens and rhubarb.

This garden is currently being paved over by a president annoyed by wet grass.

“Dinner with the President” also offers the current president’s standard order at the Golden Arches: two Big Macs, two File-O-Fish sandwiches and a chocolate milkshake.

Just imagine the great thrill of being invited to dine with the president of the United States and then, in a room with a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the wall, tall candles flickering in a gilded candelabra, an abundance of silver trays and the eager guests clad in their Sunday best confronting a mountain of fast food in cardboard boxes.

The New Yorker describes it like this: “There is a particular awfulness to McDonald’s or Burger King once it’s gone cold. By the time America’s greatest collegiate football players arrived, in their navy blazers and Sunday shoes, to pick up porcelain plates and work their way through this cardboard buffet, the French fries would have grown cold and mealy, the burger buns soggy, the precise half slice of American cheese on each Filet-o-Fish sandwich hardened to a tough, flavorless rectangle of yellow.”

Reminder: Years ago, this president filmed commercials for Pizza Hut and McDonald’s.

Recommended: Go outside and, while you pull some weeds, just try to imagine a gathering of our nation’s leaders, from the White House to members of Congress to the Business Roundtable to that guy who owns X, in a big field of any produce with this task: “Pull out the weeds!”

Yes, we live in troubling times, but even with the recipient of the Annual Rubber Dodo Award from the Center for Biological Diversity for “greedy and corrupt policies against wildlife, wild places and people” sitting in the Oval Office, we should fear not. Instead, go pull some weeds and think of those strawberries on the Monday Munch menu and know this: “Berry” comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to shine” and “straw” from a root for “to spread, to strew.” This is what Monday Munch offers — a wide spread of sunshine along with good food.

And remember to give a nod to a guy named Joe.

Monday Munch, June 30
11:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Sloppy Joes on a bun with pickle chips, cole slaw and strawberry cake with whipped cream.

(Note: Susan Ohanian, recipient of the George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honest and Clarity in Public Language, has written more than a dozen books about public schools and two other books: “Trump, Trump, Trump: The March of Folly” and “The Little Red Book of Trump Quotations.”)