Eggs Benedict Arnold

Suppose you’re a cartoonist, and this POP (phrasal overlap portmanteau) has, well, popped into your head:

eggs Benedict Arnold = eggs Benedict  (breakfast dish of sliced ham on English muffin with hollandaise sauce) + Benedict Arnold (American general who defected to the British during the Revolutionary War)

Can you work this (entertainingly) surprising juxtaposition of elements into a cartoon?

Today, Mike Peters (of Mother Goose and Grimm) took up the challenge:

(#1) The solution is a play on traitor: an egg dish named for a traitor, sold at a place named Traitor Joe’s — with a trader / traitor pun alluding to the grocery chain Trader Joe’s (a perfect pun for most Americans, for whom trader and traitor are homophones; a clever imperfect pun for everyone else

Sweet. Meanwhile, others have labored to devise variants of eggs Benedict that are somehow associable with Benedict Arnold.

The Canadian bacon Benedict. A natural idea: replace American sliced ham with a British counterpart — in particular, the kind of back bacon that Americans call Canadian bacon, as in a recipe for “Eggs Benedict Arnold” in Yankee Magazine‘s New England Today: Food section on 12/27/15, for eggs Benedict with an English muffin and Canadian bacon (instead of sliced ham). Not pictured here, because the hollandaise sauce covers the meat, so it could be virtually anything under the sauce.

On many sites, this dish is called Benedict Arnold’s eggs.

Relevant background on Canadian bacon. From NOAD:

noun Canadian bacon: US lean cured meat from the back of a pig, typically served in thick, round slices: we start by opting for leaner meats that still pack tons of flavor, including Canadian bacon.

And from Wikipedia:

Canadian bacon is the American name for a form of back bacon that is cured, smoked and fully cooked, trimmed into cylindrical medallions, and thickly sliced.

American bacon is fattier side bacon, cut from the pork belly and typically served in thin strips.

(#2) Canadian bacon at Safeway

American bacon , in contrast, from The Spruce Eats site on “What Is Bacon?”:

(#3) Uncooked bacon strips

Traitorous eggs Benedict. From the National Public Radio site, “Sandwich Monday: The Dunkin’ Donuts Eggs Benedict Breakfast Sandwich” by Ian Chillag on 3/10/14:

(#4) Back to sliced ham, but now as hand-food

By turning the open-faced sandwich closed and upping the viscosity of its Hollandaise, Dunkin’ Donuts has brought portability to Eggs Benedict … The full name is Eggs Benedict Arnold, because this sandwich is a traitor to everything breakfast should stand for.

Well, actually, that’s not hollandaise at all, but “hollandaise-flavored spread”. And those are suspiciously thick English muffin halves. Ok on the eggs and the Black Forest ham.

Other Eggs Benedict portmanteau variants in development. First, Eggs Benedict XVI, something to speculate about as Pope Benedict The Rat XVI nears death. Bound to be unsavory.

Then, a more pleasant task, imagining Eggs Benedict Cumberbatch: both good-looking and talented.