Sound-side Teriyaki
September 19th, 2016Filed Under: lettuce, mayonnaise, mustard, provolone, rye with 0 Comments
At the Outer Banks, as in life, sometimes you’re ocean-side and sometimes you’re sound-side — and either way, everyone likes a nice sandwich for lunch.
In this case, everyone (meaning me) had marble rye piled high with teriyaki-flavored chicken that I took a chance on and that ended up being quite tasty.
Mahlakas hirveburger teraleival
July 1st, 2016Filed Under: bacon, cheddar, onion, pickle, venison with 0 Comments
A burger is a sandwich. And an open-faced sandwich is a sandwich. So it stands to reason that an open-faced burger is a sandwich, too.
Especially if the burger includes thick-sliced, fatty bacon; pickled onions; black bread; and a venison patty. Also, when I say “fatty” bacon, I suspect you may not fully understand just how fatty I mean. This is a country where many bars and restaurants include, well, simply slices of pork fat on their menu. This particular bar/restaurant happened to serve its slice of pork fat attached to the rest of the slice of bacon, on top of a patty of venison, and below rings of pickled onion, with the whole kaboodle being on a slice of black bread. Fucking delicious.
Great Moments in Jurisprudence: Chicken Sandwiches Uncopyrightable
August 25th, 2015Filed Under: cheese, fried chicken, lettuce, miscellaneous, tomato with 0 Comments
(h/t Ars Technica)
The sandwich in this picture is uncopyrightable. The picture itself, on the other hand, is absolutely copyrightable. The use of the picture here, though, is solely for the purpose of commenting on a highly newsworthy matter of great social import, to wit, the copyrightability or lack thereof of sandwiches, and to serve as an educational illustration of the sandwich at issue in the litigation in question.
Last Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit issued a decision in an appeal from the District of Puerto Rico. The plaintiffs essentially claimed that South American Restaurants Corp., which is among other things a Church’s Chicken franchisee and a seemingly misnamed entity (as Puerto Rico is not in South America), owed them for the continued use of a sandwich recipe that one of them concocted while working there. The sandwich, which is called the “Pechusandwich” and/or the “Pechu Sandwich”, “consists of a fried chicken breast patty, lettuce, tomato, American cheese, and garlic mayonnaise on a bun.”
As the appeals court put it:
Congress has enumerated eight categories of works available for copyright protection:
(1) literary works; (2) musical works, including any accompanying words; (3) dramatic works, including any accompanying music; (4) pantomimes and choreographic works; (5) pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; (6) motion pictures and other audiovisual works; (7) sound recordings; and (8) architectural works.
17 U.S.C. § 102(a).
Contrary to Colón’s protests on appeal, the district court properly determined that a chicken sandwich is not eligible for copyright protection. This makes good sense; neither the recipe nor the name Pechu Sandwich fits any of the eligible categories and, therefore, protection under the Copyright Act is unwarranted. A recipe — or any instructions — listing the combination of chicken, lettuce, tomato, cheese, and mayonnaise on a bun to create a sandwich is quite plainly not a copyrightable work.
If you’re curious, if the court had held that sandwich recipes are copyright-eligible, the [almost certain] existence of previous sandwich recipes identical to the one at issue wouldn’t have hurt the plaintiffs’ case. (Or, at least, it wouldn’t necessarily. Though the recipe might well have been considered a work for hire, and then they could have lost on that point.) Unlike with patents, where (as John Carmack can tell you) coming up with something yourself independently isn’t a defense to infringement, where copyrights are concerned, if you didn’t copy, you didn’t infringe. (But, of course, nothing is ever simple; courts can sometimes infer copying via the principle of “striking similarity“.)
Skier Sandwich
March 6th, 2011Filed Under: cheese, guacamole, ham, meat, turkey with 0 Comments
In California, you can’t take two steps without tripping over an avocado. Good thing, too, because leftover guacamole makes for an excellent sandwich addition. This ‘wich was most energizing after a snowy Tahoe ski day.
London Broil is Falling Down
August 5th, 2009Filed Under: beef, mayonnaise, mustard, provolone, toasted with 0 Comments
. . . down my gullet, that is. I was at the store, buying cold cuts, when I absentmindedly ordered an entire pound of London broil. “How will I eat this all?” I wondered. Turns out I had no need to worry, because the stuff was absolutely delicious. Goes great on a sandwich (see above), especially with a nice dijon mustard. It also goes great by itself, eaten directly out of the package.
Fly the bland skies
July 29th, 2009Filed Under: ham, swiss with 0 Comments
After the sandwich I ate on my previous flight, I had high hopes for this next one. Unfortunately, the memory delightful blend of flavors in that sandwich just made the blandness of this one more unbearable. Ham, swiss, and bread. The bread was basically sawdust with some rolled oats on top — and it was the most flavorful part of the sandwich.
Peppermint
May 30th, 2009Filed Under: brie, mint, toasted with 1 Comment
Pre-toasting
We happened to be in Manhattan, so my girlfriend insisted on treating me to a meal at Les Halles. Everything was delicious, other than the somewhat wilted salad greens. Also, it had to have been 90 degrees in there, and I’ve been to nightclubs where the music wasn’t as loud. But I digress — this isn’t a Yelp review, after all.
Anyway, point being, the appetizer we ordered was (a) fantastically tasty and (b) something we thought we could reproduce at home, even without buying Anthony Bourdain’s cookbook. The menu describes the dish as “Croûtons de Coulommiers rôtis au miel et poivre (Brie topped with honey & cracked black pepper, roasted and served on croutons)”, which is a rather apt description. (Yes, I’m making the executive decision of classifying this as a sandwich, albeit an open-faced one.)
Post-toasting
Now, a week or two later, we tried our own hands at it, and decided to use a wedge of brie with pepper right in the crust. As it happened, we also had some mint leaves left over from the previous night’s mint-guacamole (tragically, not itself a sandwich). The end result was pretty goddamn good — as far as I’m concerned, we managed to improve one of Anthony Bourdain’s recipes. Take that! Seriously, though, it’s tasty. Try it out.
Tobacco Quay
April 28th, 2009Filed Under: basil, lettuce, mozzarella, onion, provolone, toasted, tomato, tuna salad with 0 Comments
Another day, another exam. Ho-hum. The parol evidence rule(s); third-party beneficiaries; claims, defenses, and remedies under the UCC? Who cares — I’ve got this tasty “Tobacco Quay” sandwich from the overpriced deli by school. It’s basically just tuna salad, but it’s very well made.
Property Pizzandwich
April 23rd, 2009Filed Under: mozzarella, pepperoni with 0 Comments
Today I get to write about the law of [real] property — landlord-tenant disputes, adverse possession, wild deeds, and eminent domain. I don’t know what any of it means, but I do know that this is one tasty sandwich: it’s like a pizza, but it’s on bread! Also it has no tomato sauce and it’s at room temperature. Quiet, you.
A New Sandwich for America
January 20th, 2009Filed Under: ham, mayonnaise, münster, mustard with 0 Comments
A veritable shitload of people gathered on and around the National Mall today, to celebrate the inauguration of a new President. Some waited for hours in the bitter cold or drove from hundreds of miles away; others were lucky enough to arrive and find a place to stand fifteen minutes before the ceremonies started. People of every race, creed, and color were standing together, united in one common trait — hunger.
Seriously, though, I knew I’d be standing out there a long time. So I brought sandwiches.