A couple weeks back, I went to a family funeral in Montgomery, Alabama. After the service we did what generations of Southerners have done before us: We gathered at the table, we commiserated, and we ate. Our meal was a low-key affair. No church-lady casseroles. No pies capped with meringue.
At the center of the table was a platter of double-decker sandwiches from a local, four-location chainlet, Chappy’s Deli. (Their motto: “New York Flavor, Southern Hospitality.”)
At first glance, and upon first bite, they were ordinary. Chicken salad on marbled rye. Corned beef on seedless rye. That sort of thing.
Then I bit into a double-decker ham-and-cheese, the top half of which was loaded down with potato salad, as if, in Montgomery, potato salad is not considered a side dish, but a condiment.
Later, when I called Chappy’s, I was told that a potato salad schmear is a common request on take-out platters (it’s not on the dine-in menu). “We’ll put potato salad on anything you want us to,” said the nice lady who answered the phone.
Need I tell you that, although the meat and cheeses were humdrum, the spread of potato salad proved transformative? Need I reveal that Chappy’s mayonnaise-heavy goo was just the sort of glue needed to keep a double-decker intact?
On the drive home, I racked my brain for analogous sandwiches.
I could get to potatoes easily. As in the fries that the Primanti Brothers of Pittsburgh have long tucked into (and piled atop) steak sandwiches. As in the gravy-drenched French fry po’ boys of New Orleans, believed by some to be the original iterations of those epic sandwiches.
And I could think of other, seemingly counterintuitive, ways in which potato salad has been employed. Like as ballast in the bottom of a bowl of gumbo, the way it’s served in southwestern Louisiana.
But, at the risk of suffering the slings and arrows of folks who surely know better, I’ll go out on a precarious limb here and say that I know of no place in America, other than Alabama, where potato salad is a widely embraced sandwich condiment. Slaw, sure, but potato salad, not so much.
Go ahead, prove me wrong.
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