Hoagy and Hoagies

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Here's good eating for the home front! Easy to make - and easy on points, too!

So it's 1943 and there's food rationing and you need to think about how to make food points stretch farther, I get it. But ideally, you wouldn't have to use things like Treet (on the left hand sandwich), which is a fake meat thing, like Spam. Or Old Fashioned Loaf, the thing on the middle sandwich. They aren't even going to tell us what's in Old Fashioned Loaf, and I really don't want to know, either.

That's Liver Loaf on the sandwich on the far right, by the way. You are supposed to plonk "two liberal slices" of this on your white bread. No, thank you.

Armour suggests adding things as disparate as egg salad, carrots, peanut butter and cream cheese on the bread to offset the Treet and its friends. Also piccalilli (chopped spiced pickles). Or salad dressing.

Treet is still made today and is technically known as a "spiced luncheon loaf." You should also know that it was a favorite of the musician/bandleader Hoagy Carmichael (see here for some 1950s advertising proof), who write the music for several standards like "Georgia On My Mind" and "Stardust."  He also appeared in several movies, including To Have and Have Not (1944).

Hoagy, sans hoagie

Hoagy, of course, shares his nickname with that of the hoagie, or submarine sandwich. Was the hoagie named for Hoagy, or vice versa, or neither? One popular explanation of the sandwich's nickname is that it is derived from Hog Island, a World War I era shipyard in Philadelphia where there were a lot of Italian workers, who made delicious sandwiches that were originally called Hoggies, then Hoagies. You can see some other etymological explanations here and here. Hoagy Carmichael, on the other hand, got his moniker from his middle name - he was born Howard Hoagland Carmichael.

And would Hoagy have used Treet in a hoagie? We will probably never know. I'm thinking yes, he would have. But I like to think that he would have held off on the egg salad and peanut butter.