Do Americans not cut their sliced bread sandwiches?

[BurntBroccoli]

I've often noticed that Americans on TV never seem to cut their sandwiches in half ) or quarters like British people.
Is this a thing? Does it depend on the filling?
Do some of you not cut your sandwiches?

Thinking sliced bread type of sarnies here, not baguettes or paninis etc.

I've seen the precooked stuff in the store, but I do know people eat it for breakfast and that's definitely how they serve it in Canada. I also remember seeing peameal bacon sandwiches when I was in Toronto.

As an American, I'm not at all offended by this thread. Unlike another recent one.

I do put butter on my sandwiches but only ham and cheese or liverwurst. With mustard. Everything else gets mayo. A hard roll from the NY area is the best thing for a sandwich.

I don't have a coffee maker, I have pour over or I use a French press. I use a kettle on the stove.

The more upscale grocery stores have paper bags with handles, the regular ones have those without. And we did have to cover our books with them.

Maybe I haven't explored Canadian bacon enough but to me it's just smaller pieces of ham.

Everyone I know always cut their sandwiches but my brother never does. I think it's his giant
hands.

I can't defend Hershey's.

I don't think free standing wardrobes are a thing in the US. At least, I've never seen one. Bedrooms in most parts of the US need to have a built-in closet (plus a window to the outside) in order to be called a bedroom for the purposes of sale descriptions and municipal occupancy regulations.

I live in Canada where we do not eat order our bacon from the deli counter. We buy it raw and fry it. I always thought Americans were referring to back bacon like you would get in Canada when they talked about Canadian bacon but now I know it has nothing to do with Canada. So now I know.

I live in Central California and you have to be kidding.
Safeway, Von’s and Save Mart all have pre-made sandwiches. There must be a dozen more.

You can buy freestanding wardrobes (also kn own in the US as an armoire) at IKEA and some other places, but yes, most people just use the built in closet. You're more likely to see the freestanding ones in older homes with tiny closets.

Canadian bacon is also the correct meat for eggs Benedict, although I favour eggs royale (with smoked salmon instead)

Not true. Both are used and widely available.

Pssst, you know those Chinese food containers? You can unfold them and they make a plate.

Using a kettle on the stove and using an electric kettle take about the same amount of time.

Butter on a ham sandwich or a grilled cheese is yummy. On anything else? Not so much. Mayo, mustard, or Miracle Whip.

'American' Canadian bacon is delish on pizza. Hold the pineapple. It's also good with crackers and cheese.

I'm in NorCal and just about all the grocery stores have premade sandwiches in a case, usually by the deli. I'm Coeliac so I've never had one (none on GF bread) but I understand YMMV as far as how good they are.

She doesn't appear to have worked out yet that you spread the butter onto the bread, rather than just pressing big lumps of it into the surface though.

You should see what they say about Australia, and to a lesser extent NZ.

Using a kettle on the stove and using an electric kettle take about the same amount of time.

I live in the US now and forget that kettles boil much faster in other places. Whenever I go home for a visit I put the kettle on and then go off to do something else for a bit like I do here and always end up having to reboil it when I get back because its already done and cooling down.

The "house" thing is strange. I grew up in a house of about 970 sq. ft. One bathroom, 3 bedrooms with one bedroom about 6'x8'. Five of us lived there and we all survived. Now many people feel like they deserve the big house, no matter their income.

Big houses are definitely the norm built now. My house is only about 1700 sq. ft. and was built several decades ago. On TV though, everyone lives in houses that are huge, which can be silly when they have the person working a job at a dress shop and living in a 3000sq ft. house. Big houses here can be very, very expensive, as they seem to be in the UK. As in the UK, it depends where the house is. Interest rates rose but I find it weird when people complain of 5% interest. When we bought, interest rate on a house was 14-16%. That hurt!

Love the Chinese square take-out boxes but we also have rectangular plastic boxes that full dinners are put in. The take-out boxes where I live are pint or quart size and usually used for rice, noodles, won-tons, etc.

What do we say??

Yes houses have gotten a lot bigger over the years! One of the biggest postwar suburbs, Levittown, was 2 bedroom houses that were something like 700sf, designed to be affordable for returning war veterans. Nowadays most of them have been expanded. But up to the 1970s or so, American suburban houses were larger than British ones but not the huge ones that started to come later. Perhaps 1500sf? You can also tell how, unless you're in a wealthy neighbourhood, homes occupy more of the lot. The latest suburbs seem to have smaller lots generally. But you see that in Australia and Canada too, land got expensive and they want to reduce sprawl.

Where I come from in the US we drink loads of iced tea. We would always have a pitcher in the fridge and order it in restaurants. However, it’s not part of our psyche the way it is in Britain where I’ve seen people carry around their own tea bags.

Butter was only for warm roast beef sandwiches made from the leftover Sunday roast. Living in England now I try to split the difference and put butter on one side and mayo on the other.

The US has its own oil, gas and coal (and windfarms etc) so electricity is cheaper than Europe so big houses can be cheaply heated.and cooled.

This is a Scandinavian thing. I wonder if they’re to blame for bringing it over to America or if it went the other way? So many ‘salads’ in Scandinavia are just that ingredient with mayonnaise added (egg salad, ham salad etc) and not a sniff of lettuce or the like.

The lots for houses are so small these days that when you sneeze, the neighbors on each side say "Bless you". I can't imagine what they do when you fart. 👀👃

Salad actually means a dish of mixed ingredients. A Russian salad is vegetables in mayonnaise. A green salad is leafy.

amazing thank you!

Paper bags with no handles are at some grocers, but there are still a lot of plastic shopping bags used. I can remember when they first got rid of paper bags because of the trees and the environment and introduced "plastic bags". That worked out well. Sometimes the old ways are the best ways. Trader Joe's has paper bags with handles.

We have an electric tea kettle, and it works pretty quickly, though not as fast as the ones in the UK, I am sure. I do have a stove-top one, but it's in the basement now. We also have a Keurig coffee maker and DH also uses a French press. DH loves tea, and sometimes he buys tea leaves to brew.

Most butter their toast or use butter and jam. We do not butter our bread for sandwiches, though I used to when using peanut butter.

Laundry chutes--My parent's had one, as did other homes that had basements, but not every home. They seem to be out of favor now, as are mail chutes that drop the mail right into the house instead of getting put into a mailbox.

Prefab homes and trailers are sturdy for most storms but potentially deadly in a tornado or hurricane. There are few homes anywhere that can stand up to an EF-5. Brick, wood, stone, doesn't matter. Even if the walls could hold at first, the roof would blow off and then the walls would blow apart.

Butter-as in anything else, there is a variety. We use stick butter when baking and Kerrygold for everyday eating. There are other fancier butters but Kerry suits our taste.

Bread--to me, brown bread is rye or pumpernickel bread. The rye bread can come with caraway seeds or without. Wheat bread is wheat bread.

I would use mayo or aioli on a cucumber sandwich, though just cucumber on a sandwich doesn't excite me. .

Grilled cheese is bread, butter on outside or in and out, cheese between the slices and then "grilled" in a pan on the stove.

Here, homes come with closets. Nicer homes ($$$$) usually have the walk-in closets, sometimes in every room. They aren't counted as bedrooms though. Don't use wardrobes much here, unless an older home with those tiny little 2 foot closets that are eight inches deep.

Bedroom windows, at least where I live, have to be a certain size, face the outdoors and be reachable. I have never seen a house with an indoor window, except when someone added on to their house and didn't remove the old window that used to face outside. (all to save a few bucks). Maybe some places have interior windows for light and I just have missed it.

Chocolate--we have EXCELLENT chocolate. Godiva for one. There are also many local chocolate factories and independent chocolatiers. I would hold many of those chocolates up against anyone's, anywhere. Now, our supermarket chocolate is passable at best, in a pinch. I don't like or eat Lindt or Cadbury.

When the students from the UK came to my town for a few weeks, they fell in love with Kool-Aid and a couple of the gum flavors. When our students went there, they made sure to take lots of Kool-Aid and the gum. Still don't understand what Squash is.

@Sunnytwobridges No one is bashing anyone. We are sharing differences and answering questions. It's been fun and now I am dying to try British chocolate! Signed--The #1 Chocolate addict

UK doesn't understand baby showers but what about bridal showers?
As an American, I do not understand "hen-dos" at all. Way OTT in too many cases.
What about Christmas in America irritates folks from the UK?

Everyone I know fries up Canadian Bacon. I wouldn't like it cold, but it's cooked/smoked. I also don't eat hot dogs without "cooking" them, even though they are usually cooked.

Yes, the brown paper bags were used to cover school books, be a garbage can liner and to hold the daily newspaper when you were done, as we saved them for some group's (GS or BS) "paper drive". We'd load the car up and take it all down there and load it into a huge trailer. Back then, the trailer would fill, and we lived in a small town at the time. LOTS of newspapers......

@Sleepydoor So now we will have to invade Canada and steal your bacon. Leaving soon and armed with a Nerf Gun.

I've only heard aluminium in Australia, but I had a roommate from the south and was schooled in correct pecan pronunciation. It's p'kahn. Pee can is a (rude) way to say bed pan.

Thanks to the overnight input from the US contingent

Previous MN discussions on 'hot drinks in the USA' caused me to pay attention when I watched The Big Bang Theory where I then noted that they used stove top kettles to heat water for their many cups of tea.

On Chinese takeaway containers, the one we go to is about 50/50 on plastic tubs (which we reuse for freezing leftovers and batch cooking) and foil with cardboard lid.

But something we don't really pay attention to in the UK is square footage of housing? Do any Brits on the thread actually know the surface area of their house?

We just say it's X bedrooms and might add a subjective description such as small or refer to the era, eg Victorian or Post War, to cite particular building booms.

It's listed in UK property listings nowadays; maybe if you bought a long time ago you wouldn't know? American ones often do now too, and new builds always say.

As for salad: in parts of the country, especially the midwest, it also means "things with jello". There are some horrifying concoctions. Some only turn up on pages for bad 1950s recipes, but others live on. Look up Watergate Salad. If you go to an American potluck, you might get a quinoa salad, or you might get a jello concoction from someone's mother's Lutheran church cookbook. (See also: Casseroles.) I do like American food, but it seems that in the 1950s food companies and home economists produced a lot of recipes to convince housewives to buy their products, and many of them were awful.