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.

In the mid-90s I was at uni in Wales and Safeway introduced American style brown paper bags. I thought I was so cool walking up the huge fuck-off hill carrying my bag with my baguette poking out. It was great unless you had tins of beans and it was raining.

You can get electric kettles now in the US but they take longer as the electricity is 110V instead of 220.

I make French press or pour-over so I have a kettle to boil the water.

I did not grow up putting butter on meat sandwiches (kosher house) so the US habit of mustard or mayonnaise works fine for me! I prefer mayonnaise to butter for chicken or turkey. It works better to keep the meat moist.

Some of my local Chinese places use the white containers, some use foil or plastic ones with clear plastic tops for the meat dishes and cardboard for the rice and noodles. The cardboard ones with the flaps aren't leak-proof.

Thankfully we have automatic shut off kettles in Australia - same voltage as the UK. I use it all the time, not just for making drinks. I think the fact it turns itself off is what makes it so great.

Laundry chutes are great. You can get DC to pick up their room much easier if they can just through the clothes down the chute. It's fun. Although, we used to find toys and candy wrappers in the laundry basket at the bottom every so often. We have great butter here. I bake with it and we eat it--Land O'Lakes is my every day favorite, but I currently also have Kerrygold, Plugra, which is cultured, and organic butters, both salted and unsalted. Sometimes I make butter from heavy cream and occasionally I buy Amish handmade butter. All from my regular supermarket

Everyone jumped in before I got back to the thread, and they are 100% correct. I don’t know about old New York tenements and old brick buildings, but in today’s building code, every bedroom must have two ingress/egress options to the outside. It’s for safety. If a fire breaks out on the other side of the bedroom door, you have a window to get out.

It's not only Americans that don't have this but I first discovered it while in Florida - you can't get Squash. The stuff you put in water that is fruity flavoured not the vegetable ( which I was offered). This was a revelation to me at 21 but on research there are hardly any countries in the world that have squash. I love me an apple and blackcurrant. I'm on holiday now and have those mini squirties .
The rest of the world doesn't know what it is missing. Squash is simple yet genius.

Thank you!

I'm from Texas and that's exactly what I am always saying exactly that to my British family and friends.

I'll add something to that though. I am from far west Texas and when you have hot dogs and/ or sausages on the outside grill, we call that a "weenie roast". Do you call it that where you live?

I love those barbecue competition shows.

Yes, we say "weenie roast" too. Hot dogs and Italian sausages.

Aluminum. They pronounce it correctly.

We decided to change it to aluminium because we wanted it to conform to the other elements or some such, so that’s on us. They decided to keep the original word/spelling.

Pecans are native to the Americas, so I hardly need to go into that one.

Those old ceramic kettles as seen in Cell Block H, with the exposed cables inside the water and cable that connects at the top near the lid, scare the life out of me. Were they actually safe?

American Cadburys is different to British. It's made under licence by Hershey's and it's crap, although one reason for the formula change is that the FDA doesn't let you label something as chocolate if you use vegetable fats (just like the old EU vegolate wars!). It has to be called "compound chocolate". Several years back they cracked down on grey market imports because it interfered with the licence so you won't see it in import aisles now. Hershey's uses a process called controlled lipolysis to control the milk going off (it was a big problem 100+ years ago, apparently) and it gives the chocolate a taste that people find rancid if they didn't grow up on it. I'm not fond of it myself. But in terms of cocoa percentage, cheap chocolates around the world (Nestle, Hershey, etc) are all the same, ie not very good. There's fancy chocolate made in the US too and of course imports.

Hershey, Pennsylvania is like the American answer to Bournville, though. The streetlamps are even shaped like Hershey kisses. We went there and I must say that even though I don't like Hershey's chocolate, the Reese's factory was going that day and the roasted peanut smell was fantastic.

Now if we're going to talk sweets -- purple flavour sweets in the USA are Concord grape, not blackcurrant, and it's a very distinctive flavour that takes some getting used to!

@LegoTherapy I'm sure your godfather finds those conversations thrilling. By the way pecan is pronounced either way in the US.

@MadCattery I'm in NYC and you still need windows for it to "officially" be a bedroom. People just tend to ignore it because we have to use every available bit of space.

DS's massive bedroom is technically an "office" because even though it has 2 exits, it doesn't have any windows.

Vermont Creamery is my favourite American butter and what I buy for spreading. Land O'Lakes is what I buy for cooking and baking.

Newer homes often have upstairs laundry so no chutes, and of course not in places like Texas and Florida where the houses have no basements. By the way, wood frame construction is actually safer in earthquake prone areas, while cinder block is safest for hurricanes and you'll see it in south Florida. Masonry collapses in an earthquake unless it's specially reinforced, so brick houses would be a terrible idea in California.

Ready-made and pre-packaged sandwiches aren't really a thing where I live in the US. In the supermarket you go to the deli counter and get a sandwich which is made to order

I read a very entertaining Twitter thread a while back in which Americans enthused about their deep love of Meal Deals, acquired whilst living/working in the UK. The general agreement was that pre-packed sandwiches weren’t a thing back home. I seem to remember the thread was started by someone who’d gone back Stateside but felt the need to express his yearning for a Tesco meal deal and many others joined in.

My supermarket (Wegmans) now has some premade sandwiches and wraps but yes, getting them freshly made at the deli counter is more usual -- and I know so many Americans who loved premade sandwiches from Tesco or M&S!

Ugh, sorry, THROW, not through. It's not a dreaded American spelling; it was just me being an idiot.

That must have been before my time in Australia haha! The kettle I have is just like the one I had in the UK.

The Cadbury’s chocolate you can get in America is made by Hershey and doesn’t taste the same as the UK equivalent (although some may argue the difference is less pronounced since Kraft acquired Cadbury). This New Yorker article goes some way to explaining why (essentially US chocolate manufacturers never worked out how to make chocolate without curdling the milk). When I lived in the USA the only Cadbury’s chocolate you could get that wasn’t made by Hershey was creme eggs at Easter.

This is what I'm thinking of...

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/134166315735

I believe they do, they have kool aid.

That’s interesting. I have been here since around mid 1990s and have not seen a kettle like that. You are right, it looks scary.

Kool Aid or such is sort of like squash, in that it's a sweetened fruit flavoured drink, but not exactly. You make it up from powder usually rather than concentrate. Different flavours as well.