Hot Sandwich Filling

Hot Sandwich Filling

Not really sure what this is.

My mother is making “hot sandwich filling” for the birthday celebration, she reports in her email. Oh, and a cake. I know what a cake is. I don’t really know what “hot sandwich filling” is. If it were on a menu, I would want to ask the waiter, “What is “hot sandwich filling, exactly?”  I’m pretty sure my daughter, Isabelle, who has been a vegetarian since she was five, won’t eat it.

Knowing my parents, raised on farms in Iowa, it probably contains the meat of an animal that would have been familiar to them. Like cows, sheep, and pigs. I guess chickens were familiar, too. So maybe this filling is made of chicken. Then again, there were cans of Spam on the shelves in the pantry and you could heat that up – even easier today with a microwave. Maybe the “hot sandwich filling” is just hot Spam. I am hoping it is not made of something unfamiliar to a farmer from Iowa, like snake or monkey or things that a Chinese person might use for “hot sandwich filling.”

I think it is always nice, as a guest who is bringing something to a party, to compliment the cook’s menu. It’s hard, when you don’t know exactly what the main dish is and you don’t want to sound ignorant and have to say, “What exactly is hot sandwich filling? I’d like to bring something to compliment it.” 

So that I don’t seem rude, I won’t ask. I guess I’ll just bring a Snickers salad with apples and cool whip. Here in the upper Midwest, that seems to go with everything.