Sometimes it takes a random TikToker to make you realise you don’t know your wife quite as well as you thought. In my case, the revelation came via an American influencer in Paris called Amanda Rollins. She went viral recently thanks to a video in which she earnestly explained that the French do this really weird thing: they put butter on sandwiches.
“What they do, it’s like a classic sandwich: it’s ham, cheese and butter. Literally, just swab it on – no mayonnaise, no mustard, just butter,” she says in the video. “And listen, I know you might be thinking that sounds gross. It’s actually so good.”
Rollins was ridiculed for her analysis, which was picked up around the world. But rather than laugh at her, I am here – as a Briton in the US – to commend her for shining a light on the under-reported fact that Americans don’t understand that you can put butter in a sandwich, preferring to drown it in mayo instead. My American wife, it dawned on me with horror, was guilty of this habit. “Why don’t you butter your sandwiches?” I texted her urgently. (“This is not innuendo,” I added.) “Yuck,” she replied. “A sandwich needs mayo.” We were, I realised, two countries divided by a common language and a completely different approach to spreadable fats.
So why aren’t buttered sandwiches popular in the US? It is easy to understand why Marmite might not make the leap across the Atlantic, but butter is surely a staple. The explanation, I think, is that, like their horrible chocolate, a lot of American butter is substandard, because of looser regulations; European butter has to have a higher butterfat percentage than American butter and those extra percentages add a lot of flavour. American butter is usually designed for cooking and, unless you go out of your way to look for the good stuff, it doesn’t add much to a sandwich.
Anyway, having cleared that up, we can move on to harder-hitting issues: why have Americans not discovered the late-night kebab or the sausage roll? Now there’s a question to sink your teeth into.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
