On the heals of the success of the first “Is My Blog Burning?” event, Alberto over at Il Forno has announced that there is soon to be a second. This time, the mantle of leadership is being taken up by Clotilde over at Chocolate & Zucchini.
This month’s theme is Tartine. For those of us who are not native French speakers, Babel Fish offers this translation for Tartine: Slice of bread, while Clotilde offers this explanation:
A tartine is a popular Parisian dish, in which different ingredients are arranged and served on a slice of bread — a sort of open-faced sandwich if you will — usually on a bed of greens.
She also offers a link to her post, The Wonderful World Of Tartines, as further explanation. It includes a very appetizing photograph to illustrate the concept.
As a geek, I find the possibilities of this highly exciting. I had been under the mistaken impression that the bread/filling combination we know as the sandwich was purely an n-ary structure. While most people consider the sandwich a binary structure, that is, two slices of bread with something in between, in reality, the sandwich is actually two or more slices of bread with something in between, hence n-ary; where n≠1. Now, with the introduction of the tartine, we can extend this, in a kind Unified Sandwich Theorem, to include the long sought after unary condition (where n equals 1)!
Of course, we are all familiar with the origin of the sandwich, although not created by, but rather named for John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (alias the Insatiable Earl) who, during a long night of gambling, and not wanting to stop to eat, was rumored to have sent a servant to get him some meat between two slices of bread so that he would not soil his cards.
Of course, even the Earl’s title is not without an interesting etymology. You see, “Earl of Sandwich” is a hereditary title that the fourth Earl obviously inherited from the first Earl, who selected the title. The first Earl was originally going to select the title “Earl of Portsmouth,” but at the last moment changed it to “Earl of Sandwich” to honor the town where his fleet embarked on its journey to return Charles II to England. So it is only through happenstance that we are not all eating Portsmouths. 
All of that said, the tartine does predate the sandwich. In fact, the Croque Monsieur — similar to the Monte Cristo — is now reverting back to its original form as a tartine.
Anyway, the big day is Sunday, March 7th, 2004, so start planning.