Sarah from Moorhead, Minnesota, emailed a story from her early days of teaching in North Dakota. While reading the lunch menu to her students, she was flabbergasted to see that the day’s fare included something called slushburgers. She’d grown up calling this loose-meat sandwich a sloppy joe. Other names include tavern sandwich and spoonburger. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Slushburger”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
We asked you to send us your memories about food and language, and we heard from Sarah Trone in Moorhead, Minnesota.
And she said that when she was a first-year high school English teacher, she taught in Williston, North Dakota, which is in the northwest corner of the state near Montana and the Canadian border.
And it was her first year, and she said it possibly the first or second week of her new career.
And one of her duties was to read the day’s announcements to her homeroom students.
And she writes, I got to the lunch menu to read and then said this.
Today for lunch, slush burgers? What’s a slush burger and why would I want to put it into my mouth?
And her students cracked up and had to explain to her that a slush burger is what she grew up calling a… sloppy Joe?
Sloppy Joe.
Sloppy Joe, of course.
Yeah.
That’s what most people know it as, right? A sloppy Joe?
Yeah.
But there are other terms for it around the country?
There are other terms around the country for it.
And in most of the Dakotas, you call it a slush burger.
Oh, interesting.
That’s cool.
Because we don’t think of slush. We think of slush as being dirty mushed ice.
Yeah.
Like, humbled dirty ice.
Yeah, exactly.
But I grew up calling it sloppy joes.
I imagine you did too.
Yeah, I’m very sure.
Yeah, but you can also call it a spoon burger or a tavern sandwich.
And these are all crumbled meat with sauce.
It’s not the ones that are crumbled meat without sauce, which I have another whole list of names, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Like the made rights and the crumbly burgers.
Yeah, they kind of creeped me out even before I became a vegetarian.
Because, you know, they would make the buns so wet and soggy.
Sloppy Joe Day on school was a great day, particularly if they included a nice big chunk of the government cheese, which I loved.
And you put it right on there.
Oh, so good.
Well, we know that you’ve got a lot of memories about food and language.
Share them with us.
We never get enough.
Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
