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Hot Dogs, Sandwiches, Cereal & Soup

Is Cereal a Soup?

  • Yes

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • No

    Votes: 27 100.0%
  • Other - Please specify

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    27

Yithian

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In the same vein as previous enquiries into Jaffa Cake taxonomy, I'd value judgments on the following simple questions:

a) Is a hot dog a sandwich?
b) Is cereal in milk soup?

Rationale also appreciated.
 
Yes - I'd call a hot dog a sandwich, though most folks refer to it as a special category all its own. It's bread enclosing meat (etc.), you can tote the entire item around as a single object, and it's eaten by hand rather than by implement.

No - I wouldn't consider (cold) cereal with milk a soup. For one thing, its ingredients are combined in the final moments before consumption, whereas soups (even those served cold, in my experience ... ) have their ingredients combined and collectively steeped prior to serving.

I suppose I consider the relationship between cereal versus soup to be akin to the relationship between a mixture and a compound in chemistry. I see cereal as a mixture of at least two components whose individual characteristics remain evident, whereas I see soup as a compound (blended / joint composite) of the initial ingredients.

I can eat cereal dry, drink some milk separately, and claim with no more than a mischievous smirk that I've 'eaten cereal'. I can't separately eat (e.g.) carrots, peas, chicken, etc., and claim I've eaten chicken soup.

Furthermore (and just in case ...), I'd have a hard time referring to hot cereal (e.g., oatmeal) as anything approximating a soup, though I concede it can be quite 'soupy'.
 
I can eat cereal dry, drink some milk separately, and claim with no more than a mischievous smirk that I've 'eaten cereal'. I can't separately eat (e.g.) carrots, peas, chicken, etc., and claim I've eaten chicken soup.

I find this persuasive.

Soup etymologically stems from broth poured on bread, so perhaps the distinction required inheres in the difference between broth and milk. Broth has been prepared; milk is consumed in its raw state. And yet milk itsslf is colloid, which makes it brothlike in itself...

On Hot Dogs, however, I remain reluctant to commit. There's something about that horizontal oppening that makes me reluctant to climb onboard the sandwich train just yet.
 
... On Hot Dogs, however, I remain reluctant to commit. There's something about that horizontal oppening that makes me reluctant to climb onboard the sandwich train just yet.

Consider subs (submarine sandwiches; hoagies; grinders; etc.). They're assembled in a horizontally-sliced loaf analogous to a hot dog bun, and some folks consume those of a modest diameter 'upright / opening upwards' like a hot dog. I've never heard anyone question whether a sub is a sandwich.
 
There are widely-advertised hot steak-sandwiches and open-sandwiches . . .

So neither a hot filling nor lack of a top piece of bread-stuff can disqualify a thing as a sandwich, it seems.

Bridge-rolls, barm-cakes or just "barms," buns, baps tend to be ordered by name, according to local custom. If you ordered one, you might well baulk at a flat old sandwich. If they had run out of the desired roll, you might settle for one.

Butties and sarnies, however, seem to imply slices of a standard loaf, probably machine-sliced these days, or else the proverbial - and obsolescent? - door-stop, inch-thick kind. :confused:
 
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I'm with James. Anything in a bun is not a sandwich and that includes a hot dog. A sandwich is made up of sliced bread.


Breakfast cereal isn't soup but I can't explain why, it just isn't. It's like trying to describe dark matter.
 
A roll is a subspecies of sandwich, I'll concede, and a hot dog seems instinctively to resemble a roll.

Dissension here though:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/11/its-not-a-sandwich/414352/

Yes. A roll is a subspecies of sandwich. But a hot dog is actually part of the burger family*. They resemble rolls yes, but only through convergent evolution, the way a tenrec resembles a hedgehog, and a fossa a cat.

* A crown group, or clade, and sister taxa to the keebab.
 
This justifies the drafting of a Tree of Bread, or perhaps an evolutionary depiction of snacks.

Defining genera/phylums etc could be fun.

Perhaps it should be called a Sheaf of Bread, in deference to the wheat angle. Or is this all getting a bit corny?
 
I think there's some melding of verb & noun adding to the uncertainty. Something can be sandwiched [v] between two other things but it doesn't make it a sandwich [n].
 
Anyone served the beef of a beef-burger between two slices of white would whinge about it.

Anyone serving such a thing would be wiped-out economically, I think, in the fast-food market, before any individual customer would have time to evoke the Law or even the dictionary.

It's more pretentious fare which really needs careful policing: I recall a restaurant chicken pilaf which clearly consisted of cooked rice, a tin of Chicken Supreme and thirty bullet-peas! :eek::eek::eek:
 
But is a hamburger a sandwich?
It certainly is in Russia. Burger King are inconsistent: some of their burgers are officially sandwiches, while some of their sandwiches are, officially, _____burgers. To my untutored eye, it looks like bacon is the key ingredient, the philosopher's slice which transmutes the base burger into the noble sandwich.
 
For me, a hotdog is not a sandwich. As far as I'm concerned a sandwich is bread sliced (or opened) and filled with some (whatever). If some chicken is sandwiched between some bread it becomes a chicken sandwich, but if a chicken is sandwiched between some bread it's still a chicken, albeit in some bread. If a hotdog is transformed from its natural state (by mincing for example) it would become some hotdog, and could conceivably be used as an ingredient in a hotdog sandwich.

John Hodgman insists a hotdog is not a sandwich because you wouldn't cut it in half, like you would a sandwich, but I feel in my gut there must be an example of a definite sandwich that you wouldn't cut in half.

Cereal with milk is not soup because 'with milk' is the way cereal is intended to be served and consumed. A cup of coffee is not soup for the same reason.

You could make a soup that uses cereal and milk as its primary ingredients, I suppose, but it would cease to be a bowl of cereal in my eyes, instead becoming cereal soup or something.
 
Soup is always a synthesis, hence any allegorical use of the word in an adjectival sense, alluding to blends, transitive mixtures of intermingled parts.

'Cereal', in the contemporary context of a breakfast meal of dessicated vegetable seed/husk/kernals consumed in a cold milk suspension is not a soup, it is more of an admixture.

A relevant transitional state beyond this could be said (taxonomically) to be a pudding. So, porridge would be a good example of a 'cereal' (crop) which has been decorpusculated into a semi-soup.

I propose that the sandwich question does stand (or otherwise) upon the geometronymic acceptability of sectioned solids with substantially-irregular axes of compound asymmetry (viz a 'hot dog'/banana or a some other form of saddle torus with a significant convoid aspect: this in contrast with a linear monoaxial 'sub-oid' shape).

It could be argued that sandwiches are 2-D entities, as a communicative adduction. Since there can be only one transective axis on a 3-D cursive hot-dog (resulting in two topologically-identical derivatives, with no homeostatic planar alignment) it is scopometrically-disqualified from being a sandwich.

Or....hot-dogs are normally too bendy to be called sandwiches.
 
Hold on a mo....if French for 'soup' is 'potage', what is the word 'soup' French for??
 
The bacon roll is clearly related to the hot dog. A bacon roll and a bacon sandwich aren't the same thing. (In the same way a cheese baguette isn't the same thing as a cheese sandwich.)
 
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