Elvis was a man of huge appetites. He was particularly big (if you'll pardon the pun) on very large, very calorific sandwiches involving peanut butter. Legend has it that when visiting Denver, he ordered 22 Fool's Gold sandwiches from the Colorado Mine Company restaurant (now closed) to be delivered to his aeroplane for the trip home. These sandwiches cost $49.50 each back in 1976. Each one was made from a single French loaf, hollowed out and rubbed generously with margarine. The greasy loaf was coated with peanut butter, baked until the bread was crisp and the peanut butter runny, then adorned with a pound of crisp bacon and a whole jar of grape jelly.
A single Fool's Gold sandwich rocks up at more than 9000 calories.
I decided not to recreate the Fool's Gold sandwich, because it seemed a sure-fire route to an untimely death on the toilet.Back at Graceland, however, a favourite snack (snack!) was the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich, which comes in at a relatively modest 750 calories. I used the canonical recipe, which uses an unholy amount of butter, as described by Mary Jenkins Langston, Elvis's own cook. Now, I am a fan of peanut butter, of white bread, of bananas and of butter. But I have to tell you that I wasn't able to eat a whole one, and that as I write this I am feeling distinctly unwell and am clutching at a glass of Alka Seltzer.
peanut butter and banana sandwichThis is largely because of the huge amount of butter that goes into this sandwich - two US sticks of the stuff (that's eight ounces) for every three sandwiches. As Mary herself said, Elvis was very, very keen on good old fat:
''For breakfast, he'd have homemade biscuits fried in butter, sausage patties, four scrambled eggs and sometimes fried bacon,'' she said. "I'd bring the tray up to his room, he'd say, 'This is good, Mary.' He'd have butter running down his arms.''
Of the sandwich, she said:
''It'd be just floating in butter. You'd turn it and turn it and turn it until all the butter was soaked up; that's when he liked it."
