My mother used to tell me a story of how, during the Great Depression, people would come to their door asking for food. Her mother (my grandmother) would hand out yeast sandwiches, extolling their high nutritional value. I never got much detail on the sandwiches, but the story stuck with me. Fast forward to the internet age I would google it occasionally, but never garnered much info. What were they? What was in them?
Recently The Guardian ran an article about an arm-chair historian of sandwiches and wouldn’t you know it – yeast sandwiches! As I imagined, they were made with cake yeast and bread. Somehow, I doubt my grandma added Worcestershire sauce to her version. Reading the article, the historian rates these as one of the 5 worst sandwiches ever, and describes them as “not good”.
I’m curious. Has anyone any experience with yeast sandwiches? Heard of them? Tried them? Have a good story?
My grandmother, as a young mother in the Mojave desert, would make a type of Finnish pasty that she’d hand out to the rail riding transients and others that would pass by her house. I understand it was mostly vegetarian and contained very little chicken (if any at all) grown and raised from her and her parent’s small ‘farm’. Grandpa was the sole wage earner for them and he was riding the rails as an employee all the time.
I’ve heard of Vegemite on toast and Marmite on toast. Both are based on yeast. Very popular with British people, NZers and Aussies. I haven’t acquired a taste for it
I’ve not had nor ever heard of yeast sandwiches, but my dad once picked up lil packages at the supermarket in Austria while we were vacationing there. He thought they were cheese. They were yeast, as we discovered when we opened them and tried to spread them on bread
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
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I was going to say yes, I’ve always heard that they would not survive it. At least as to the kind of yeast you’d use for bread making.
But this study suggests beneficial lactic acid bacteria and beneficial yeasts that are found in “probiotic” food can actually survive the stomach acid and digestion.
Note this was “laboratory simulated” stomach digestion of the products, not real life testing.
