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.