Mayo vs. Miracle Whip
This is the deepest faultline in American sandwich-making, and the one most likely to end a marriage. Mayonnaise is, technically, an emulsion of egg yolks, oil, and an acid (usually vinegar or lemon juice). Miracle Whip, introduced by Kraft in 1933 at the Chicago World's Fair, is a "salad dressing", legally distinct from mayonnaise because it contains less oil and added sugar and spices. Miracle Whip is sweeter, tangier, and noticeably yellower.
The mayo camp argues for purity: a clean, fatty, neutral canvas that lets other ingredients sing. The Miracle Whip camp argues for character: it brings flavor of its own, complementing meats and pickles without disappearing. Regional patterns are real. The American Midwest leans Miracle Whip. The coasts and the South lean mayo. (In the South, Duke's specifically, a tangier, eggier mayo with no sugar, evangelized with religious fervor.)
Neither side will ever convince the other. The flavor was imprinted in childhood, and adults rarely switch. If you grew up on Miracle Whip, mayonnaise tastes like nothing. If you grew up on mayonnaise, Miracle Whip tastes like a mistake.
Toasted vs. untoasted
The toasted-bread partisan claims structural integrity, textural contrast, and the warm comfort of crisped crust. The untoasted partisan claims tenderness, the way fresh bread compresses around fillings without fighting them, and the simple fact that toasting can dry bread out.
The argument depends entirely on what is going on the bread. A cold turkey sandwich on cottony white wants the bread soft. A BLT, with hot bacon and juicy tomato, wants toast or it will collapse into pulp. Tuna salad on toast is a textural triumph. Tuna salad on untoasted is a soggy regret.
The rule, if there is one, is this: toast when there is moisture to manage or heat to balance. Skip the toaster when the sandwich is delicate, the bread is fresh, or the goal is comfort over crunch.
Crusts on or off
A divisive topic that maps almost perfectly onto age. Children, by overwhelming consensus, hate crusts. Adults have made peace with them, mostly. The British finger sandwich tradition, cucumber, watercress, smoked salmon, formalized the no-crust school. Tea sandwiches must be crustless. It is law.
The pro-crust position is structural and economic. The crust holds the sandwich together. The crust is the part you grip. Cutting it off wastes bread and creates an unsatisfying, geometrically odd object. The anti-crust position is sensory: crusts can be tough, dry, and bitter, especially on commercial sandwich loaves. They get in the way of the soft interior pleasure.
There is a third position, which is to use bread whose crust is integral and delicious, sourdough, ciabatta, a real baguette, at which point the question dissolves. Nobody trims the crust off a baguette. The argument is really an argument about bread quality.
Peanut butter before or after the jelly
This seems trivial. It is not. The order matters because of moisture. Peanut butter creates a fat-based barrier on the bread. If you spread peanut butter on both slices and put jelly between them, the jelly cannot soak through and turn the bread to paste. If you spread jelly directly on dry bread, you have about ninety seconds before the sandwich becomes unworkable.
The correct order, if you want a PB&J that survives a packed lunch, is: peanut butter on both slices, jelly in the middle. The peanut butter waterproofs the bread. The jelly stays where it belongs.
This is not opinion. It is engineering. People who put jelly directly on bread do not understand what they have done to themselves.
Cold cuts vs. freshly roasted
The deli cold cut, pre-sliced, pre-packaged, ready to layer, is the dominant form of sandwich meat in America. It is convenient, consistent, and shelf-stable. It is also, for the most part, processed: emulsified, cured, sometimes mechanically separated, often pumped with brine to increase weight.
The freshly roasted alternative, pulling apart a chicken you cooked yesterday, slicing into a leftover pork loin, hand-carving turkey from a real bird, is incomparably better. The flavor is deeper. The texture is more satisfying. The sandwich tastes like a meal, not like a snack pretending to be a meal.
The cold cut wins on volume and convenience. The roasted meat wins on every other axis. If you only ever eat cold cuts, you do not know what a sandwich can be.
Cheese melted vs. cold
A grilled cheese demands melt. A pastrami on rye demands cold. Between those poles is a wide and contested middle. Should the cheese on a turkey club be melted? A ham sandwich? A roast beef? Cheese behaves differently at temperature: cold cheese is a textural element, almost vegetal in its firmness. Melted cheese is a sauce, binding everything it touches.
The melted-cheese partisan argues for richness and integration. The cold-cheese partisan argues for distinctness, each ingredient announcing itself separately on the palate. Both are correct, in different sandwiches. The mistake is treating one rule as universal.
Tomatoes: pre-salted or raw
A tomato sliced and laid directly on a sandwich will weep all over the bread within minutes. The water inside a tomato slice is held in suspension; once cut, it leaks. Salting the tomato slices and resting them on a paper towel for ten minutes draws the water out, concentrates the flavor, and prevents sandwich collapse.
This is a small intervention with disproportionate payoff. The tomato tastes more like itself. The sandwich holds its shape. If you have ever bitten into a BLT and gotten a faceful of pink water, you needed pre-salting.
Diagonal cut vs. straight cut
A sandwich cut diagonally is, demonstrably, a better sandwich than the same sandwich cut straight across. The diagonal cut produces more surface area on the cut face, which means more visible filling, which makes the sandwich more appetizing. The diagonal point is also easier to bite into, a smaller initial mouthful eases you in.
No serious deli cuts straight. Mothers who pack school lunches know this in their bones. The straight cut is the sign of someone who does not care, or worse, someone who has never thought about it.