SPAM Grilled Cheese Sandwich—Houston Astros (Minute Maid Park)
While it’s not as hotly debated as “Is a hot dog a sandwich?”, there is a long-simmering debate about what exactly constitutes a grilled cheese sandwich. For the purist, a grilled cheese sandwich is bread and cheese, and maybe you can add some butter on the bread. That’s it. A grilled cheese sandwich is bread and cheese. It’s not bread, cheese, and ham. It’s not bread, cheese, and roast beef. It’s not bread, cheese, and hamburger. Those are all their own things, like a ham and cheese or a roast beef and cheese or a patty melt. They are not grilled cheese sandwiches.
So you can imagine what a purist thinks of the Houston Astros offering the Spam Grilled Cheese Sandwich at Minute Maid Park this year. Spam? Really? Once you add the Spam, it’s no longer a grilled cheese sandwich! It has become something entirely different, something that sullies the name of the classic grilled cheese.
Spam is defined as a “canned precooked meat product.” I’m always a little wary of eating something with “product” at the end of its name. In this case, the perfect paring for Spam is another food product—Velveeta Slices (“pasteurized prepared cheese product”). You can put them together and sell them at a ballpark near you, but don’t call it a grilled cheese. I think SpamVeeta Sandwich has a nice ring to it. Of course, that doesn’t mean I’d eat it.