You can’t “Viva Las Vegas” after eating an 8,000-calorie sandwich.
While fans and National Enquirer front pages alike would attest to seeing him alive, it’s hard to imagine Elvis Presley outliving his eating habits.
Instilled in him during his Southern upbringing and fueled by sudden wealth, the King’s diet aided such ailments as high blood pressure, an enlarged colon and heart disease.
With Tuesday marking the 39th anniversary of his incredibly untimely demise at the age of 42, here’s a look at a few of those notorious courses that took his life off track.
The bacon/banana sandwich
His life starting in poverty, Presley’s childhood involved occasionally having to subsist on squirrel meat. As such, food became the Tupelo, Miss.-born musician’s sole pleasure after he found fame and fortune, according to the BBC documentary “The Burger and the King.”
“He said that the only thing in life he got any enjoyment out of was eating,” Mary Jenkins Langston, Presley’s chef for 14 years, told the BBC. “And he liked his food real rich.”
Prepared in a skillet full of butter, the sandwich bearing the rotund ruler of Graceland’s name consists of toasted bread, peanut butter and slices of banana with bacon occasionally tossed into the mix. Langston would recall that he’d request the dish for breakfast, at 2 in the morning and any time in between.
Deluxe peanut butter and jelly sub
Another hit single from his food discography was the Fool’s Gold Loaf.
More or less what the devil would make you if you asked for a sub but you weren’t specific enough about what kind you wanted, the Fool’s Gold Loaf is a hollowed out loaf of bread filled with an entire jar of peanut butter, an entire jar of grape jelly and a full pound of bacon.
Presley and friends reportedly took a private jet to the home of this hellmouth hoagie, the Denver-based restaurant the Colorado Mine Company, to buy 30 FGLs and down each and every one with champagne before heading home.
If the description alone doesn’t have you “All Shook Up,” keep in mind that a single sandwich contains about 8,000 calories.
Meatballs wrapped in bacon
Known in some circles as “Elvis’ Party Meatballs,” these chunks of chow answer the question commoners were once too afraid to ask: “What if we wrapped meat with more meat?”
Encircled by bacon and held together by a sadly inedible toothpick, the tiny bomb of ground beef was reportedly among Presley’s favorite snacks. According to the New York Times, his tastes remained rooted in his rural upbringing, as he would forego dishes like caviar for childhood fair such as other pork-centered pleasures like collard greens and chitlins.
Bologna BBQ surprise
The recipe calls for punching holes in a half stick of bologna, grilling it or putting in the oven on a low heat for about an hour, covering it in barbecue sauce then cooking it for about 30 minutes more while constantly basting the seasoned roll of finely ground sausage.
As NPR noted for its episode of “All Things Considered” that highlighted this particularly Presley preference, the meat is a fitting meal for the massive monarch as bologna traces its lineage to mortadella, a sausage esteemed enough to be served at weddings.
The addition of barbecue sauce, however, is purely American.
Biscuit-filled lumberjack breakfast
Did Elvis like breakfast? You butter believe it.
“For breakfast, he’d have homemade biscuits fried in butter, sausage patties, four scrambled eggs and sometimes fried bacon,” Langston told the BBC. “I’d bring the tray up to his room, he’d say, ‘This is good, Mary.’ He’d have butter running down his arms.”
Occasionally, Langston would go a different route that saw a couple of Presley’s breakfast favorites combined into a single baseball-sized dish consisting of a biscuit fried in butter then packed with sausage.
You could say the food was perfect for putting on some “Blue Suede Shoes” and being on the go, but he often just stayed in bed to eat, no footwear required.
