The peculiar tradition of the rib sandwich.
BBQ STATE OF MIND
“Have you ever heard of a wish sandwich? A wish sandwich is the kind of a sandwich where you have two slices of bread and you wish you had some meat …”
So go the lyrics to the 1956 song “Rubber Biscuit” by the doo-wop band The Chips, which was famously covered by Dan Aykroyd of the Blues Brothers.
I think of the wish sandwich every time I stumble upon the rare barbecue-menu find known as the “rib sandwich.” Except in this case, there’s plenty of meat — pork ribs — but I wish I knew how to eat a “sandwich” consisting of bone-in pork ribs between two pieces of white bread. If you bite into it, you’re bound to chip a tooth.
I first encountered a rib sandwich many years ago at Burt’s Meat Market on Lyons Street in the Fifth Ward. I ordered it out of curiosity. Expecting something along the lines of a chopped beef sandwich but with chopped rib meat instead, I was dumbfounded to find three bone-in spareribs haphazardly thrown into a container with two pieces of white bread.
Clearly, this was not a sandwich in the traditional sense.
Recently, I noticed that Burns Original BBQ has a rib-sandwich special every Wednesday, so I trekked out to Acres Homes.
Pitmaster Gary Burns filled me in on proper eating procedure: Pinch off a piece of bread and tear a strip of rib meat off the bone. Squeeze them together and dip them into a cup of barbecue sauce.
Simple enough. But why bother with all that work?
There’s no documentation about the peculiar dish’s history, but a general history of barbecue offers clues to how this tradition may have come to be.
Long before contemporary barbecue joints started serving generously portioned “three-meat” plates to prosperous and rotund consumers, an American worker of the 1920s or 1930s might visit a local meat market to get a couple of pork ribs or slices of beef shoulder for lunch. Certainly a meager meal compared to today’s standards, but enough to provide minimal sustenance in less flourishing times.
Histories of Central Texas barbecue relate that general stores often would be located next door to these meat markets. After acquiring the meat, the workers would go next door to buy less expensive “fillers” to make sure they were full after lunch. Pickles, onions, cheese and especially white bread augmented the smaller portions of meat.
It’s easy, then, to imagine an enterprising meat-market owner of yesteryear deciding to distinguish his lunch menu by including white bread at no charge. But instead of calling it “three ribs and a couple slices of bread,” he got fancy and just called it a “rib sandwich.”
At Burns, the rib sandwich hews to tradition, though it is more generously portioned. A slice of white bread is topped with three meaty pork ribs, with an additional layer of rib tips (the trimmed part of the rib containing pockets of succulent pork and fat between bones and gristle) added on top of that. A cup of not-too-sweet sauce is offered on the side.
“We’ve been serving it and eating it for as long as I can remember,” Burns said.
Anthony Bourdain stopped in at Burns BBQ Friday to film a spot for next season’s “Parts Unknown” on CNN. We’ll see this fall what he has to say about the rib sandwich.
There’s something strangely meditative about eating a classic rib sandwich. Tear bread, tear meat, dip and eat. Repeat.
In a barbecue world where competition reigns — who can make the best, who can eat the fastest, who can post the most click-worthy photograph — I often wish more dishes were like this. It forces you to slow down and actually taste the barbecue.