Fundraiser Sandwich Night Supper in Salinas, California by Ruth Paget
One of the traditional Main Street economic motors of the Midwest that I grew up with in the 1970s in Royal Oak, Michigan was food fundraisers by religious organizations, amateur sports teams, and community service clubs.
Today the remnant of these fundraisers are bake sales and chocolate sales, but once sandwiches, potluck lunches, pancake suppers, and soup suppers used to be the backbone of local fundraising that gave parents a night off from cooking and helped support Main Street supermarkets at the same time.
All the above is background for my family’s viewing of the Olympics Opening Ceremony in Milan-Cortina, Italy while we ate items from a food fundraiser.
My daughter Florence Paget bought pastrami and rye bread from a local synagogue as part of their winter fundraising. Pastrami is a tender, salty, sweet, and smoked beef brisket usually that is cut into thin slices as sandwich meat.
Pastrami was easy to purchase in Detroit (Michigan) where I grew up due to its large Jewish population at the time. I took pastrami sandwiches for granted then, but know now from watching youtube videos that it can easily take more than a week to produce pastrami.
I appreciate the sandwich more now as an adult and like it that Florence’s support for the fundraiser helps with local youth programs and social hours for seniors like pancake suppers helped at my parents’ Baptist church when I was a child.
The traditional bread that pastrami is served with is a rye bread. Rye has a bitter flavor due to rye seeds, which can seem oily. I can almost feel harsh, dry weather of a vast windy plain when I eat rye bread.
Rye bread is an acquired taste, but if you like it, you can benefit from its seed-grain combination for what vegetarians call a protein combination based on matching amino acids. The rye bread’s protein adds to what is present in the pastrami.
Rye bread and pastrami taste especially good with mustard. I used French Maille mustard from Dijon (France) on the sandwich. Mustard contains antioxidants and selenium, making it a good winter condiment when access to fresh fruits and vegetables are often limited in places with cold weather and snow.
A dill pickle is the traditional accompaniment to the pastrami sandwich on rye. I drank an Italian Peroni beer with the pastrami sandwich since it seems to be an official sponsor of the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina.
I enjoyed reliving a bit of my youth in Detroit (Michigan) with this meal. I also like the idea of a multicultural sandwich night as a way for local sports teams, service organizations, and religious organizations to do fundraisers that help working parents and support Main Street markets at the same time in Salinas, California and the surrounding Monterey County region.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France and developer of the Novgorodand Bento War Games
