Fish or foul: Sen. Warner goes off the deep end
Senator’s sandwich was not a tuna melt — but, rather, an atrocity
This week, Sen. Mark Warner took to the internet and committed a crime against tuna. It was a crime against tuna, against sandwiches and tongues, and against all human eyes.
And in its own way, it was riveting.
What he did, on his official @senatorwarner Instagram account, was make something he swears is a tuna melt. It was not a tuna melt. It was a microwaved, fat-globbed and soggy ball of sticky fish bread. And Sen. Mark Warner appeared to love it.
The video is, perhaps, a deadpan satire of the quarantine videos legislators are putting out to relate to their millions of constituents trapped at home during the coronavirus crisis, a folksy send-up of other legislators’ elaborate meals and harmonica concerts and fancy ice cream drawers.
The video might be, as Washington Post writer Tim Carman has suggested, an elaborate ruse. It is, Carman surmises, a secret PSA for hand-washing made by a food-sophisticated senator who likes fine dining and pig roasts in the summer.
But let’s take it at face value for the moment.
“What I am about to prepare, I grew up on, ate a lot of it, learned to make it very, very young. It is truly my real specialty,” he said in the video.
He then proceeded, in truly unseeable fashion, to make something alien to all previous human conceptions of sandwich.
After laying out two slices of Martin’s butter bread, Warner then endlessly squeezed out thick strands of non-Duke’s mayonnaise — verily, a horror movie in slow motion — until it formed a thick, craggy and oleaginous landscape atop the bread. It filled the mouth to look at it.
But he was not done. He then jabbed a fork into a can of undrained tuna — he leaves the fish juice in for extra flavor, his staffer swore later, before alluding to even more terrifying sandwiches — and sort of smeared the fish bits queasily in the mayo gloop.
No pre-mixed tuna for this guy! No seasoning, no spice, no herb or fat-cutting lemon juice! No pleasing crunch of celery or onion! This is a U.S. senator, with no time to mix tuna and mayo in a bowl! Mark Warner mixes his tuna on the bread!
And then after adding two squares of cheddar, he does yet another unthinkable thing, something I hadn’t even considered as a potential option. He placed the whole soggy mess in the microwave.
It was like watching Dr. Steve Brule make a sandwich. This is not how adults melt their cheesy tuna! The internal screaming shouldn’t hurt so much!
But that’s the thing. Of course it’s not how adults make a sandwich.
If we believe him, this is the sandwich Warner has been making and eating since he was a child, an abomination that gives the senior U.S. senator from Virginia a bit of comfort in troubling times.
One suspects, even if sincere, that he knew this sandwich was disgusting. He says his family, who won’t eat it, had told him so. But maybe … maybe he was also asking for forgiveness.
Well, we forgive you, Sen. Warner. We not only forgive you, but salute you.
Because in this time of bare pantries and stress eating and gin-fueled coping, many of us have reverted to the foods of our childhoods — childhoods, perhaps, no less idiosyncratic than the senator from Virginia’s.
In the early days of social isolation, you’d see the showpiece meals, as all of our social media feeds turned into the test kitchen for Bon Appetit. We watched our friend’s first go at a whole smoked brisket, witnessed salmon indulgences that took hours in the kitchen.
But as time at home has dragged on, and economic prospects look more dire, many of us have been reverting to the more utilitarian foods we ate growing up, cheap staples whose chief merit is their long familiarity.
Maybe, if your parents are Thai or Chinese, you’ve been making big cookers of rice porridge with chicken stock and garlic and perhaps some fish sauce. Maybe you’re rediscovering the rice and beans of meals cooked in times of lack. Or you’re calling your Filipina mom, and asking what she put in her pancit.
If you’re me, you maybe find yourself caramelizing onions in sugar and oil the way your mother and your Polish grandmother did, and throwing them onto a sandwich. Maybe, like a generation of Anglo-Saxon college chefs, you’re congratulating yourself for dropping an egg into your ramen.
And maybe, while working from home, you’re cooking yourself lunches you wouldn’t ever serve another human being, but which offer a small bit of succor: cheesy tuna pasta with improvised spices, tacos whose fillings were chosen according to whatever happened to be in your cupboard, or a meal’s worth of Ritz crackers topped with leftovers.
And maybe you make a soft, fishy mayonnaise sandwich that your wife and children refuse to eat.
There is no judgement here. We’re all well beyond that, now.
So what are you eating during quarantine? Please send us your go-to quarantine meals — whether a meal from your childhood, your favorite thing you otherwise wouldn’t have time to make, or a new-fangled concoction borne of the paucity of your pantry. Email matthew.korfhage@pilotonline.com with the meal and the story behind it. Exact recipes not required. Pictures heartily encouraged.