Crust – an essay

Cake Zine is a literary food magazine based in Brooklyn. Each issue it publishes stories based around a different adjective-inflected food, for example Tough Cookie, Humble Pie, or Forbidden Fruit. This essay is taken from their Daily Bread issue, and it’s a beautifully simple piece of writing about the things we do to please the people we love, and the stories we tell ourselves about the reasons why.

When we make our daughter a peanut butter and jelly sandwich – but let’s be honest here: She is a bourgeois “New Brooklyn” child who has never had the Skippy, Welch’s, or Wonder bread that were staples of my millennial childhood; her nut butter is almond or cashew, her jelly is some artisanal mango-apricot or raspberry jam, and her bread sports nine different grains – we always cut off the crust. The whole process is a three-knife affair, one for each spread, so as not to contaminate the jars with any errant nut butter or jam, and then a bread knife to cleanly remove the crust and create perfect little squares. It wasn’t even a discussion that my partner and I had, whether to keep the crust on or not; we moved on pure instinct.

Growing up, that’s the only way I would eat any sandwich. It didn’t matter what was in between the bread – very few things made it in between my bread, since I couldn’t, and still can’t, stand when anything makes the bread soggy. The crust had to be cut off. No exceptions. I wouldn’t touch the sandwich otherwise, not even to rip the crust off myself, since that would make the edges jagged and visually unappealing, and what I’m saying is I had a lot of feelings about the details of my food that I haven’t totally worked out in therapy just yet.

And my mother obliged. She might have made a little playful jab at me (“My strange child, the one who only eats peanut butter sandwiches, no jelly, with the crust cut off”) but the sandwiches were always made to my specifications, and she never pushed me to try to eat them any other way.

This, I knew, was love.

What I heard a lot, from many people and probably more times than I ever actually ate a crustless sandwich, was that this was something I would, at some point, outgrow, that cutting the crust off a sandwich was a thing that small children do because they’re small children who don’t know better, similar to picking and eating their boogers, and a sign of maturing is realizing that you shouldn’t do that any longer.

The other thing I heard a lot, from a single source, was how fortunate I was to have the choice of taking off the crust. My father, he often reminded me, had no such choice. We were too poor, he said, to think about wasting food that way. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich was a luxury, he said, we could barely afford those.

Sugar sandwiches, he said, that’s what we ate.

I’m not sure if he thought this would humble me into eating my crust (it didn’t) but perhaps one motive for him repeating his sandwich origin story, broken record that he was, had to do with wanting to impress upon me how hard he had worked to make my preference possible. Yes, my mother made the sandwiches, but he was the literal breadwinner, and he brought enough of it home that I could throw away perfectly edible parts of it simply because I didn’t like them.

Suppose I should be grateful; this was, after all, his way of showing me love.

It didn’t register at the time, the class differences between our upbringings, since I grew up around other middle-class kids, some of whom liked crustless sandwiches the way I did, making it seem “normal.” Whatever my father said about his childhood was noise I had to tolerate but not take in. His naval career afforded us distance from it: I grew up in the 1990s Virginia Beach suburbs, 220 miles away and thirty years removed from the poverty that defined his life in 1960s Washington, D.C. This is the way he wanted it, but it also meant I couldn’t imagine what the childhood he described looked like. Cutting the crust off my sandwiches was, to me, just being a kid.

And then corporate America capitalized on this perception with the introduction of Uncrustables, the frozen sealed sandwiches that hit the market in the United States in 1995 (Japan’s Yamazaki Baking Company introduced the product in 1984 and sold it to the J.M. Smucker Company in 1998). They are what they sound like – white bread sandwiches with no crust, the bread sealed into itself to form a full protective barrier over the filling. The flavors range from classic peanut butter and grape jelly, to peanut butter and strawberry, peanut butter and honey, or the more dessert snack-style hazelnut spread. As the package says, you just “Thaw & Eat!”

They were and are very obviously aimed at the child market, which is also to say they’re aimed at the exhausted parent market (though also a favorite snack among NFL players). But if you are calculating the grocery bill, and asking yourself how to stretch a dollar as far as it will go, the question is: who can afford a four count ($3.99), or ten count ($10.99), or fifteen count ($13.99) box of pre-made, frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with no crust? Or more to the point: Who can afford to outsource the labor it would require to make them on your own?

Better still: Who can afford this version of love?

It makes more sense to me now, as both a parent and a person with a fragile ego, that my father saw my childhood sandwiches as emblematic of his success – his child wasn’t forced to consume something he didn’t like. An indication of your level of affluence is how much you can afford to waste.

When I think about the other places I encountered crustless sandwiches, they were filled with adults and lots of money. Growing up, we didn’t know anyone with lots of money (despite my father’s ambitions and serial entrepreneurship, we never ascended the economic ladder to the level where people refuse to say how much they make, or will only describe themselves as “well-off”), but I saw them, on TV, in movies, serving their tiny English tea-inspired sandwiches, crust removed.

There’s a scene in the movie Brown Sugar, where Sanaa Lathan’s character Sidney attends the bridal luncheon for her best friend’s (Dre, played by Taye Diggs) fiancée, and is confused by the cucumber sandwiches being the most substantial food on offer. After the luncheon, she and Dre scarf down a hot dog from a street cart. In the 1980s South Bronx, where these characters grew up, lunch meant something different. But at this point, Dre is a successful record executive marrying a successful entertainment lawyer – they are in the upper class and will deny their guests real sustenance in order to prove it.

When my mother died, I thought about sandwiches more than I expected. She expressed her love through all kinds of food, but the sandwiches from my childhood stand out above the rest. It was the care, the attention to detail, the support – even when I reached an age where I was “supposed” to grow out of it, she still made them.

And so, today, I do the same with my daughter’s artisanal nut butter and jam sandwiches. But the only reason she eats her dainty sandwiches is because my partner and I can afford the waste. There was something to what my father said (though I hate to admit him being right about anything). The gap between his childhood and my daughter’s is even wider, which is exactly what you hope for with each generation – that feeling that you’re doing better than the one before, providing a world in which the crustless sandwich can be a childhood treat, and nothing more.

Then there’s the other part, the actual making of the sandwich that my mother delivered every time, exactly the way I liked. One of only a few examples I have of unblemished love.

And then one day, I made my daughter one of those sandwiches, and she reached over those meticulously prepared morsels of my care, and ate the scraps of crust.

Cake Zine is a literary print magazine exploring art, history, and pop culture through food. We delivered their Humble Pie issue to Stack subscribers in 2023, and then we delivered their Forbidden Fruit issue last year, which just goes to show how much we like them.

Mychal Denzel Smith is a writer. His latest book, Stakes is High: Life After the American Dream won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.

Towoqo (Tan Wei Qi) is a Singaporean illustrator based in London and Singapore. Her works are characterised by the distinct use of the brush and ink, taken from traditional Chinese painting techniques. Curious and passionate about storytelling, Towoqo carries a sketchbook wherever she goes. She aims to convey meaningful stories and emotions through each illustration, whether humorous, sad, or joyful. You can see more of her work on Instagram.