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Who is ready for a disgusting-looking sandwich??

This ugly little guy is Tuna Sandwich Bake.

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Tuna Sandwich Bake
Author: Hunts, 1957
Serves: 4-6
Ingredients
  • 12 slices bread
  • 2 (6.5 oz) cans of tuna, drained
  • 1 cup chopped celery
  • 3 eggs
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 2 (8 oz) cans Hunts Tomato Sauce with Cheese
  • 3/4 tsp salt
  • 1/4 tsp dry mustard
Instructions
  1. Make sandwiches with tuna, mayonnaise and celery mixture. Place in oiled 8×12 shallow baking dish.
  2. Beat together eggs, milk 1/2 cans Hunt’s sauce with Cheese, salt and mustard. Pour over sandwiches.
  3. Bake at 325 degrees for 30 minutes. Pour over remaining Hunt’s sauce with Cheese. Bake 5 minutes longer.

 

Can I confess that it was actually thrilling to make this? It was. It’s been a while since we’ve made something that looks so much like vomit on bread. I have to admit that I was laughing evilly when I put this together.

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Two things about the recipe. Well, three. The first is: Really? Who thought this would be a good idea?

The second thing is that I couldn’t find tomato sauce with cheese in it, so I improvised. Those little bits are cheese, not corn. I suppose I should have melted the cheese into the tomato sauce to make it authentic, but the baby was napping and I only had a limited amount of time.

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The third thing is that I realized when I pulled these out of the oven that I should have stopped thinking of them as sandwiches and starting thinking “strata”. I think I was supposed to tightly pack them together rather than treat them as just sandwiches with sauce spread on top.

But what was done was done.

And then Tom walked in.

“What is this garbage?”

“I don’t know what it is now. It used to be tuna sandwiches.”

“Of course. Why have a tuna salad sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup when you have have both in sandwich form? God.”

“I know, right? I love mid-century cooking.”

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“Ugh. I do not want to eat this.”

“Take a bite, people are waiting.”

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“That the…is that surprise?”

“Yeah, this isn’t actually that bad. Taste it.”

“No.”

The Verdict: Not Horrible

From The Tasting Notes –

Surprisingly, this didn’t completely suck. After I baked it, I realized that I should have packed the sandwiches closer so that it could have become more of a strata and less of a mess, but hindsight is always 20/20. The bread was, of course, a soggy mess, but when you got a bite of the tuna salad and the tomato sauce it was actually pretty good. The worst part was the soggy bread on the bottom. It didn’t have any flavor and was just gross.

If you really want to try this for some reason, I would recommend either packing the sandwiches tight into a dish with some of the tomato sauce on the bottom first OR toasting the bread. Or at least buttering it so that it could have a chance to get toasty on the bottom instead of just soggy. I sprayed my baking dish with Pam, but I think when the recipe said “oiled” they actually meant “pour oil in your dish” rather than just giving it a spritz of Pam.

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