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For years tuna salad sandwiches, along with hot dogs and fish sticks, were the go-to food when feeding large numbers of American children, especially in school lunchrooms. These sandwiches were comprised of cheap white bread filled with a few limp pickle chips and an oval of tuna fish, gluey with mayonnaise. Sometimes this mayo was celery laden. Sometimes not. Whatever the case, the tuna sandwich was a staple in American school lunchrooms for decades.

Then tuna became overfished and ceased being a cheap go-to lunch. In fact, it ceased being any kind of lunch at all, unless you were very wealthy. And then tuna was usually dinner, and never in a sandwich.

Lacking fancy tuna, I give you seasonings on an elegant platter.

Tuna populations have rebounded enough to discuss them, though they are no longer the cheap, carefree meal of my childhood. Then again, few foods are.

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I confess writing about tuna makes me a bit nervous. Nobody needs to be told how to make tuna sandwiches. I consulted numerous cookbooks, and they all seemed to agree. The few tuna salad recipes I managed to find offered scant instruction, the implication being they were taking up valuable page space better used by another, less familiar recipe.

(A few days later I found recipes for tuna casserole and tuna loaf in Mildred Bellin’s The Jewish Cookbook, which was published in 1958.)

Another, less familiar recipe.

Atop this, recent blogging newsletters all have a single message: Forget SEO. Forget AI. Shut up and get to the recipe.

Not, mind you, that I’ve ever spent a second on SEO or AI. Neither have anything to do with writing, food, or photography. As for annoyed types wishing to jump directly to the recipe, I doubt many of them read this blog. (But if you do, thanks.)

Returning to tuna fish.

I realized I thought about tuna as two separate foodstuffs, and figured I wasn’t alone. There is canned tuna, and there is the tuna served at sushi bars and upscale eateries. It is amazing, even improbable, that these are the same fish, so different are they in appearance, taste, and texture, to say nothing of cost.

Granted, the above is hardly a revelation on the level of the Cartesian mind-body split, but nobody is here for philosophy. (At least, I hope not.)

To this end, I give you the Insufficient Kitchen’s version of the Tuna Salad Sandwich, with some options to jazz it up, because heaven knows we should continue eating decently, even if it feels society is crashing down around our ears. We should eat decently anyway, because that is what civilized humans do, and we are–most of us, anyway–civilized enough to appreciate a good sandwich.