A New York City listener recalls that as a youth in Erie, Pennsylvania, he and his peers referred to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich as a choke-and-slide or choke-n-slide. It’s a reference to the qualities of the sticky peanut butter and the slippery jelly. The colloquial names of some other foods also refer to how they make their way down the throat, including gap-and-swallow and slick-and-go-down or slip-go-down. Other foods named for action associated with them are saltimbocca, literally “jump into the mouth,” and tiramisu, from Italian for “pick me up!” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Choke and Slide”
Welcome to A Way with Words.
Hi, this is McPaul calling from New York City.
Hi, McPaul from New York City. How you doing?
This is just a thing that popped into my head a little while back. It’s about a piece of slang phrase, like a slang expression that used to be like a very kind of common in my life, which now I don’t really ever hear it all anymore. And it goes back to when I was in sort of middle school and high school, and I grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania.
The slang that was used among all my contemporaries for a peanut butter sandwich was referred to as a choke and slide.
A choke and slide?
Choke and slide, yeah. That’s what you would call a PB&J. You know, if you’re in the lunchroom and you’re engaging and trading, it’d be like, all right, I’ll give you this choke and slide for that ham and cheese.
Nice. It’s a fun expression. I like how descriptive it is because, you know, choke and slide, right? Peanut butter is sticky and the jelly is slippery. And it’s the kind of thing where it would have been a normal expression that anybody in my whatever eighth grade class would have totally understood what you were saying. But now I really never hear it at all. And I’ve asked my kids who are, you know, just sort of just out of high school and they really had never heard that expression at all either. And I just was wondering, like, was it only like a regional expression?
When were you in the eighth grade? What year were we talking about?
Oh, this would have been like the mid-70s. I think it was in eighth grade in like 74, 75.
Okay.
Yeah. I haven’t heard it. I sure didn’t hear it growing up. It reminds me of a lot of other regional expressions that have to do with how you consume the food, like gap and swallow, which is a kind of cornmeal mush, or slick and go down, which is a kind of, I think it’s a kind of dumpling in the Appalachian region, or slip-go-down.
Oh.
Yeah. And I think you’re right about the origin, that it’s choke being the peanut butter, which sort of sticks to the roof of your mouth, and the slide being the jelly that just slips on down.
Grant, do you have a sense of it being regional, though?
No, no. There’s a tiny bit of evidence that it may be African-American. I see it pop up in Google Books and a few black romance novels. They have different author names, though they all could have been the same author writing under different pseudonyms. But I do find it in a novel from 1959 by Doris Miles Disney, not related to the Disneys as far as I know, a mystery novel called Did She Fall or Was She Pushed? And she’s not African-American.
She’s not African-American. She’s from Connecticut. And so we at least know that the expression existed in 1959 in Connecticut.
Yeah. And I associate it with an earlier era.
Yeah. I thought it might be an African-American thing just because I definitely like it wasn’t something that was in my world until I got to like middle school. And I had been in, you know, really like sort of an all white, you know, elementary school. And when I went to middle school, it was a much more mixed population. And so I thought, well, it’s probably like a piece of slang that sort of moved from, you know, one group into sort of general use, you know.
Well, now a lot more people are going to know what a choke and slide is. I should point out, by the way, that the and is often abbreviated just as an in. So if you’re looking around online for more information, look for choke, the letter in and slide. Sometimes hyphenate, sometimes not. So I do like how descriptive it is. And it also gets you down to sort of three syllables from seven, you know.
Sure. Yeah. Peanut butter and jelly.
I hadn’t thought about that.
Yeah, choke and slide. Our trick was to make it more palatable was they often served applesauce at the same time they served the peanut butter in the school lunches. You put the applesauce on top of it as well, so inside the sandwich. So it was much easier to swallow.
The applesauce on peanut butter is amazing.
It’s very good.
Is it?
Yeah. That’s like a choke and slide and slide. Choke and slippery slide.
Yeah.
All right, McPaul, thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it.
Great.
Thanks. It’s fun to talk to you. I love the show.
You too. Take care.
Good talking with you, McPaul.
Bye.
Bye.
You know, there are a lot of foods that are named for what they do. I’m thinking of saltimboca.
Oh, it makes your mouth jump, right?
It jumps into your mouth.
It jumps into your mouth. It’s a kind of Italian dish that jumps into your mouth.
What other ones are there like that?
Let me see. There’s tiramisu. Tiramisu, which it comes from an Italian dialect term that means pick-me-up, I think.
Oh, interesting. Well, pick up the phone. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Send us your jives and requests and answers and information on Twitter @wayword. And talk to us on email, words@waywordradio.org.
