Published: October 08, 2008 11:15 am            

Origins of the Southern Egg Sandwich

The title of this piece might suggest to you that there are egg sandwiches other than Southern, a tangent that is not intended, since the only true egg sandwich is indeed Southern, just like pimento-cheese sandwiches and Speesewiches and other such delicacies that might well be claimed by other regions; upon close inspection these claims are always found to be fraudulent. The Classic Egg Sandwich, the only True Egg Sandwich, is the Southern Egg Sandwich: first, now, and always. 

   As human beings, we are ever eager to search for origins, unlike others of the warm-blooded type, ungulates and such, which really care very little where anything has come from, be it good or bad, only that it is there: to run toward or from, to eat or be eaten by.

   And so we are led to the end of a quest I set upon some 20 years ago: to discover when and where the egg sandwich first came upon the scene.

Being a university professor, I have devoted a fair chunk of my life to doing research of one sort or another: to earn good grades in courses, to discover the answers to questions that troubled me, or to find material that positioned me at least half a day ahead of my graduate students, not necessarily in that order of importance.

   Here is what I have unearthed:

   The Classic Egg Sandwich, the genuine Southern Egg Sandwich, was discovered one day in Natchez, Miss., in 1853 by a fellow named Clarence Doggett. Now, let us set the scene, and this I do quite confidently, using excerpts from the journals of Mr. Doggett, a barber with more than a mere smattering of education.

  We are in the kitchen of the Doggett fambly, as he spells it, on a cool Sunday morning in February.

Clarence has already breakfasted, electing to slurp down two soft-boiled eggs and sop the little cups with a piece of crusty bread, chasing it with cow’s milk, the only kind he is accustomed to or would regard proper for human consumption, no matter his physician’s fondness for preaching the advantages of goat’s milk.

Clarence considers the goat something fit for mowing grass and nothing remotely associated with one fit for consuming. His son, Sugar Boy (pronounced Shugah Baw-wee), has just entered the room, sleepy-eyed and hungry.

  “Hey, Sugar Boy,” Clarence says to him, hoisting his massive mug of coffee, dark and untainted by sweetening or by cream, “whachu want for braffus, Son?”

  Sugar Boy is still in a stupor, like a grubworm turned up in December dirt, though the sun is well high in the sky, so he mumbles, “Ownknow,” which is Southern sleepy for “I don’t know.”

  “Whon’t I fiss you some fatback and fried bread and eggs and stuff like that, just right for my growin’ boy?”

  “Ownknow. Maybe. Wish I could just have a bowl a’sugar.”

  “Sugar ain’t good for you, Sugar Boy. Done tol’ you that plenty. You done eat enough sugar in yer life to rot out a ton of teef.”

“Maybe so, but it sho’ is good.”

   “Rot yer teef and insides too, Sugar Boy. Worse than whiskey on a person. How about some bacon and toas’ and eggs?”

   “What does whiskey taste like, Deddy [Southern for Daddy]?”

  “Now, Sugar Boy, you gotta get a might more brafusses down you before you gon’ be big enough to drank whiskey. Now, what can I fiss you, son?”

   “Maybe some toas’neggs, Deddy, but thas all. Own’t want no meat.”

  So it was that Clarence fried his son two pieces of bread, using the only thing he knew to use then, butter, which has not to this day been surpassed in taste and texture for frying things in and basting with and just in general enhancing flavor, as unassailable as oxygen in the arena of human necessity, second only to mayonnaise.

After laying the bread on a platter, he set about frying eggs for his son. He buttered up the skillet and dropped in two eggs — and wouldn’t you know it, “bofe the yellers busted” (the way Clarence describes it in his journal). Well, he couldn’t just toss the eggs, being a man of limited means, so he decided to salt and pepper them and lay them on one of the pieces of bread and have Sugar Boy eat them that way. And then a notion came to mind, he being a sensible man: What if he mayonnaised the bread first? Which he did, while the eggs lay on top of the other piece of bread. “Well, foot,” he said (or said he said, since I wasn’t there), “how come don’t I mayonnaise the other piece of bread too and lay it on top of the eggs and then it’ll be like a sandwich?” Which he did. He flopped the eggs over onto the mayonnaised piece of bread and liberally applied mayonnaise to the second piece and put them together.

But before he put the sandwich within Sugar Boy’s range, Clarence got to thinking about how good a couple of slices of tomato would be, so he lifted off the lid, “taken a tomater,” as his journal describes it, and sliced it up and laid two salted and peppered slabs on top of the eggs, then clamped the other piece of bread on again. (For those of you who wonder about where the fresh tomato would have come from in the winter, Clarence “growed tomaters and peppers” in a glassed-in hothouse in his back yard throughout the year — I told you that he was smart.)

Sugar Boy picked the concoction up and bit in, and the expression on his face was much more than his father could ever have bargained for. It changed from sleepy to interested to ecstatic.

“Oh, Deddy, oh, Deddy,” he sputtered, his mouth brimming with egg and mayonnaise and bread and tomato, “this the bes’ thing I ever done tasted in my whole life long.”

Clarence ended up fixing Sugar Boy three sandwiches that morning, and the boy begged for more, so swept up was he in this new delicacy.

So the egg sandwich was born right then and there. It has not been surpassed since and is not likely ever to be.

Just in case you doubt the veracity of this story, I have seen the journal mineownself.

(Some literary purist will probably accuse me of switching tenses back there, which I shonuff did: I have the artistic license [in my wallet, wedged between my driver’s license and CWL] to do it and the educational background to know why.)



Paul Ruffin may be reached c/o English Department, Box 2146, SHSU, Huntsville, TX 77341-2146, e-mail eng_pdr@shsu.edu.

        

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