Iron & Wine's Sam Beam: Stack of Tomato Sandwiches
Your Last Meal with Rachel Belle
Rachel Belle
4.4 • 709 Ratings
🗓️ 31 August 2023
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
If you've ever had a tomato sandwich, then you know this is the best time of the year! In honor of *tomato season* (and host Rachel Belle being on vacation) we are re-airing this episode from 2019.
Iron & Wine sounds like a band but in fact there is just one man behind the music: a soft spoken, North Carolina singer-songwriter named Sam Beam, who unintentionally stumbled into a music career later in life.
A true Southern boy, Sam wants a stack of tomato sandwiches for his last meal. Just ripe summer heirlooms, squishy white bread and mayonnaise. A simple summer snack so sacred in North Carolina, locals get riled up at the mere mention of adding bacon or lettuce. We called upon a couple North Carolina culinary queens to talk about the do's and dont's of the tomato sandwich: veteran food journalist Kathleen Purvis and chef, restaurateur and cookbook author, Vivian Howard. And sticking with the Southern theme, food historian Robert Moss joins the show to tell the true history of the boiled peanut.
Lucky for us, tomatoes are still hanging heavy on the vines, because you'll be hankering for a tomato sandwich by the end of this episode.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Alaska Airlines has teamed up with Hawaiian Airlines to create new nonstop international flights. |
| 0:05.8 | Go to Alaskaair.com or Hawaiian Airlines.com and I'll tell you more details later in the show. |
| 0:15.3 | I'm Rachel Bell and this is your last meal. |
| 0:22.6 | The show where celebrities share stories about the foods they love most, and we dig into |
| 0:26.8 | the history, culture, and science of those meals with experts from around the world. |
| 0:31.0 | Today on the program, Sam Beam of Iron and Wine. |
| 0:34.4 | My father built a mansion on the mountain. of Iron and Wine. |
| 0:51.3 | This is my favorite song off of Iron and Wine and Cal Lexico's album, Years to Burn. |
| 0:55.7 | And if all this sounds familiar, it's because this episode originally aired in September 2019. But I'm on vacation, so I'm playing it again. The reason I chose this episode |
| 1:02.0 | is because it is peak tomato season. And Sam Bean's last meal is a stack of tomato sandwiches. |
| 1:09.3 | One of the simplest but most ridiculously delicious foods I have ever eaten. |
| 1:14.3 | But the only acceptable time to eat a tomato sandwich is in the summer, |
| 1:18.7 | when the tomatoes are perfectly ripe and you can get them at the farmer's market |
| 1:22.5 | or even better in your own garden. |
| 1:25.8 | I had never had a tomato sandwich before I met Sam, and I have been |
| 1:29.2 | obsessed with them ever since. I wait all year for tomato season so I can make as many tomato |
| 1:35.3 | sandwiches as possible in the two weeks my garden produces them. And I know a lot of you are obsessed |
| 1:40.4 | as well because you tag me in your tomato sandwich photos on Instagram, which I love, |
| 1:45.1 | but I am going crazy over here because I haven't had a single tomato sandwich this season. |
| 1:49.6 | My garden tomatoes are still green and hard and I am very stubborn and I refuse to buy any |
| 1:55.6 | because I want my first taste of the season to be from my own garden. |
| 1:59.9 | Anyway, we're going to welcome a few |
... |
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