Fried Bologna & Other Southern Sandwiches
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Southern Plate is more than just me typing and chatting away. In fact, YOU are the most important part of SouthernPlate.com. With that in mind, I hope you’ll take time to leave a comment and share your favorite sandwich from your childhood. See bottom of this post for more details! Gratefully, Christy 🙂 
When my mama was a girl they had a tradition of going out riding through the countryside on Sunday afternoons. They’d stop off at a little store to have thick slices of bologna cut off and made into bologna and cheese sandwiches. Pair that with a bottled drink and they were living high on the hog! “There just wasn’t anything like getting to ride in that car and look out the window while you ate a bologna sandwich!”.
This treat was passed down to my generation when we often sat down for lunch with a big loaf of bread and a stack of cheese slices in the middle of the table while Mama fried up bologna in a skillet. We’d each make our own sandwich and I’d make mine just like my brother did: Fried bologna, cheese, and potato chips settled in between two pieces of “loaf bread”.
Bologna sandwiches, sometimes referred to as “the poor man’s steak”, are such a part of our culture, they’re even used to gauge a person’s character. On the day we got married, my husband’s best man, Jim, had driven in a ways and was planning on staying overnight before heading back. He stayed with my Grandmother, who lived across the road from what was to be our new home. It had been quite a day with the wedding and reception and that evening Grandmama and Jim went out on her porch to relax and look out over the river.
For supper, Grandmama made the two of them bologna sandwiches.
To Grandmama, Jim and my husband represented a new generation, with a huge divide between folks her age and them. Grandmama had grown up dirt poor and picking cotton all of her life and here was this young man newly graduated from college with an engineering degree whose experience with her world had been nothing more than glancing at the cotton as the car went by. Its sometimes a little intimidating for folks who come from such humble backgrounds in situations like this, but when Jim accepted that bologna sandwich, it spoke volumes to Grandmama about the type of person he was at heart. Even now whenever he is mentioned she always chimes, in,
“That Jim is just a real good boy, he sat out there on the porch and ate a bologna sandwich with me”.
To make the sandwich from my childhood you’ll need: Bread, cheese, mayo…
and potato chips 🙂
My brother taught me the wonders of a potato chip sandwich over thirty years ago.
I think it almost made up for him cutting the entire side of my hair off a few years later.
Now we have to fry out bologna. I always cut a slit halfway through to keep it from curling up into a bowl as it fries.
I prefer Zeigler bologna because it is made in Alabama. I try to buy as close to home as I can because last thing we want is to end up relying on a company halfway across the country for our food supplies. I think it’s best to support local suppliers to ensure that you have local suppliers. Zeigler’s has been around for over seventy five years. Their main plant is in Tuscaloosa and our own highly respected Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was once an owner of the company as well.
Reminder to all: I am not into football but Alabamians take their football very seriously.
So whatever team you are for, GO THEM!
You don’t need to spray your pan or anything, just put your bologna in it and cook it on medium, turning after it browns on one side. Some folks like there is just barely heated but I actually like a wee bit of black on mine 🙂
Note to myself: You use the word “actually” too much, stop it. Now. Seriously.
~sighs~
Oh lawd, that’s some good eatin’!
I always smoosh it a bit to crunch the chips down some 🙂
Grandmama, I’m a real good girl because I still eat bologna sandwiches!
A few posts back we got into a comment discussion on strange sandwich combinations we grew up on. It was a fascinating comment section and we all really got a hoot out of reading it. I’d like to devote this comment section to those sandwiches. What did you grow up on? What brands do you insist on and why?
Mayonaise sandwich? Mustard sandwich? PB and banana? Tell us all about it! Also, why do you think Southerners eat such strange sandwich combinations-ketchup sandwich, anyone?
I think it is due to lack of food. When food was scarce, you could put something between two slices of bread, call it a sandwich and then it suddenly seemed like a meal. What do you think?
If there is anything else you wanna talk about in the comments section, feel free to do that, too.
See someone else’s comment you wanna reply to? Go right ahead!
I consider this to be my big old porch and we’re all just a standing around visiting with each other.
Y’all keep the conversation going and I’ll keep the tea glasses filled!
We’re all family here anyways. 🙂
“The happiest of people don’t necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.”
Submitted by Rebecca Hall. To submit your quote or read more, please click here.
I just love getting new positive quotes so thank you in advance!
Eggs Benedict-inspired sandwich I made recently:
Soft mini French bread rolls, split, drizzled w/olive oil. Prepared a packet (1 c) of Hollandaise sauce, spread it on the cut & drizzled surfaces of the rolls. Placed thin-sliced ham on one side of roll, arranged roasted pepper strips and sliced provolone on the other. Popped ’em under the broiler briefly, just to get the provi bubbly. Probably could have omitted the olive oil, and they might have been uber-good topped with poached egg…but for a really quick weeknight dinner, I was stoked with this creation. My twin 16 y/o boys said the special sammies were “amazing.”
I noticed the liver sausage/braunschweiger sandwich, one of my favorite although the two meats are not the same. Liver loaf is the southern version of the Pennsylvania Dutch original. I also noticed no one mentioned head cheese / souse which I dearly love. Daddy made his own and i still do if I can get some pork or beef tongue. Souse, especially hot souse is the southern version of this German specialty also. No one else wanted the hog’s head on butcher day so we took it for the tongue, brains, and boiling the head for meat scraps for head cheese. Wonderful with white bread and MW, and if you have some hoop cheese (kind with the red paraffin around it.)
What memories! Thank you for posting about wonderful fried baloney sammiches! When I was little, my Nanny would make me a “special”-usually on Sunday morning, of fried baloney, WITHOUT slits so it curled into a bowl, She filled it with scrambled eggs (dripping in butter, of course) and put a slice of cheese on it! I was so certain I had to be the richest, most loved little girl in the world! And to top it off, I got to have a saucer full of big-person coffee-which was just about a spoonful of her chicory coffee in the bottom of a saucer, then filled to the brim with cream and sugar. What a big girl I was-I even tried to eat and drink like I saw the fancy ladies on TV do~~grin~~
Sunbeam bread with fried baloney and mayo-yum!
Fried egg with a slice of cheese, mayo, on sunbeam bread.
Pimento cheese and sunbeam…..
My dear husband grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and thought I was crazy eating all these sammiches, then he introduced me to HIS favorite-bacon grease drippin’ sammich. ~sigh~
Thanks for the memories!
Sybil
I just read about this wonderful website in Southern Living. What I have been missing. This about fried baloney sandwiches brought back one of my happiest childhood memories. My mother is an avid turkey hunter and would go with my great aunt to Ala to hunt and leave me & my sisters home alone with daddy. He was not a great cook so we ate fried baloney sandwiches and then would go to Piggly Wiggly to get all the makings for the world’s best banana splits. We each got to pick out the toppings we wanted and we feasted until mama came home from her hunting trips. We loved to see the taillights because we knew we would have daddy and the good food until her return to make us eat “right.”
Oh My Goodness! I am so glad to see so many positive comments on bologna sandwiches and so many variations. It makes me feel right at home. Can’t wait to see the pimento cheese recipes. Keep the good stuff coming. Southerners know how to eat the best stuff.
Lord, here I go again…Jeanene, seeing “oleo” reminds me of a new bride friend of my daughter’s. She took a recipe to the store, and was going down the list purchasing the required items. She came to one that stumped her so she found an older lady that looked like a grandma, and said, “excuse me ma’m, but can you tell me what oh-LAY-oh is and where to find it?” priceless.
My momma used to always eat either butter & sugar on white bread or globs of real Mayo on white bread…Of course it was always a “fold over” sammich.
Lordie, this takes me back to eating at my grandma’s house – we didn’t fry it thought, just ate the bologna and cheese without any cooking – with an RC out of the machine in her carport. It was GOOOD!:):) I think she might have gotten her cheese as some sort of government program, but maybe I’m misremembering?