IF YOU CAN’T JUDGE a book by its cover, the reviews on its cover can, it seems, help. Writing in the Observer, Géraldine Bedell confessed, ‘I knew I was going to love this novel when I read the back jacket reviews of Sansom’s previous book, The Truth About Babies.’ (A round of Speedy Bap! Brie, Bacon and Avocado wraps to the design team for that one.) ‘I laughed, ’ she claimed, ‘more times than I can remember over a novel in years … In a world swamped by Hollywood products and other multinational offerings, Ring Road, ‘ she went on, ‘reminded me why novels are such a relief, so endlessly, incorrigibly surprising.’ Michael Moorcock in the Guardian struck a similarly wistful note: ‘few books published these days, ’ he mused, ‘can fairly be described as charming and fewer still are the product of so generous an intelligence’. Ring Road, he said, was like ‘a distant Sally Army brass band on a warm Sunday evening … mellow, intelligent and very funny, a perfect anecdote for melancholy″. Describing it as ‘a wonderfully comic novel’, the Daily Mail’s reviewer praised the author for his ‘acute sense of the absurd’. Sam Thompson in the TLS, meanwhile, found ‘something fearless in the gaze Sansom turns on banality’. For Thompson, the novel, ‘in the end’, achieved the ‘surprisingly gripping feat of coming to terms with what ordinary life is like’. Ordinary life may be portrayed in all its ignominious glory but, as Francis King remarked in the Spectator, ‘here is no ordinary talent’. Sansom, he concluded, is ‘a writer with a viewpoint and voice very much his own’.
Sandwich A piece of meat between two slices of bread; so called from the Earl of Sandwich (the noted ‘Jemmy Twitcher’), who passed whole days in gambling, bidding the waiter bring him for refreshment a piece of meat between two pieces of bread, which he ate without stopping from play. This contrivance was not first hit upon by the earl in the reign of George III, as the Romans were very fond of ‘sandwiches’, called by them offula.
The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
by E. Cobham Brewer (from the new and enlarged edition of 1894)
YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD of Bill Currie. I’ll admit, among the pantheon of culinary innovators, the people who can be said literally to have changed the tastes of this nation – the Contance Sprys, Fanny Craddocks, Elizabeth Davids, Galloping Gourmets, Robert Carriers, Madhur Jaffreys, Delias, Jamies, Nigels and Nigellas – Currie is a figure of marginal interest. But chances are that if you took a British Rail train during the 1970s and found yourself moseying up to the buffet car, a crackle of manmade fibres, stomach rumbling, that morning’s bowl of Golden Nuggets a dim and distant memory, and selected (probably against your better judgement) a forlorn-looking cheese and pickle sarnie (nothing fancy, you understand: white sliced bread, mild rubbery cheddar, cloying brown glue that yielded the occasional crunch) then you sampled a sandwich made to Bill Currie’s exacting standards. Standards as exacting as our very own Bob Savory’s, although obviously wafer-thin turkey and chicken tikka pieces in a yogurt dressing lay an oil crisis and a recession or two away.
Concerned about the beleaguered reputation of the British Rail butty, it was Bill, in his capacity as Director of Catering, who in November 1971 issued guidelines to help staff prepare and serve perfect sandwiches.1 From then on, if you were making a sandwich for British Rail, you made it the Bill Currie way. (What Bill and his team liked to call ‘the best on the track’ way.) A sardine and tomato sandwich, for instance, wasn’t fit for consumption unless it contained 2/3oz of sardine and a 1/3oz of tomato. These ratios were also demanded of the luncheon meat and cress combo – 2/3oz meat, naturally. (Whatever your opinion of luncheon meat, 2/3oz of cress really is inedible. You’d be picking the stuff out of your teeth for weeks afterwards for a start.) But with a frankfurter bap, a full oz of sausage was required – evidently Bill was canny enough to understand that in the wake of the Mexico 1970 World Cup and decimalization, generous portions, configured in imperial measurements, would be needed to lure hungry British passengers towards such dangerously Mitteleuropean fayre.
If Bill was fastidious about the proportions of the sandwich fillings, his instructions for their construction were no less exacting. Knowing which side of the bread to butter (the side onto which the filling was placed is normally the preferred option, though Breville toasting machines did, of course, undermine this orthodoxy for a short while) is one thing. Knowing how much butter, and precisely where to spread it to ensure a flavoursome and yet visually appealing sandwich, is quite another matter entirely. And Bill, perceiving a dearth in the latter, commanded his staff to spread two-thirds of the butter, and then place at least a third of the filling, in the centre of the bread. When the sandwich was cut, diagonally corner-to-corner (like putting the milk in first when preparing tea, only plebs slice horizontally), and displayed hypotenuse outward on the counter, the filling and butter – plump and weeping from the middle – created a mouth-watering aspect. That was the theory, anyhow.
Just as Swift’s Lilliput and Blefuscu warred over which end of an egg should be eaten first (big end vs. little end), distribution of butter and fillings (piled in the middle or, pace Bill, spread evenly across the bread) splits opinion. The American food writer M.F.K. Fisher (of whom W.H. Auden once claimed, ‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose’) probably would not have enjoyed one of Bill’s comestibles. Fisher comes down firmly on the side of an even spread. ‘The filling’, she writes in With Bold Knife and Fork (1968), ‘should be of good quality, and should be spread or laid right to the sides of the foundation, and even spill over a little if feasible, rather than lie lumpishly in the middle.’ Decorum prevents her from divulging the recipe in full but the sketch she offers for her family’s favourite ham and mustard Railroad Sandwich (American diners, it’s worth remembering, began life as railway dining cars) includes a secret ingredient (not very secret since it appears in the book) that even in the free-and-easy, kids’ climbing-frames on concrete bases, municipal drinking fountains 1970s Bill would have rejected outright on health and safety grounds. The sandwich must be sat on for at least twenty minutes. British Rail passengers were no doubt at leisure, and certainly provided with ample opportunities, to experiment along these lines themselves while travelling or simply awaiting their connections. And who knows how many commuters, inadvertently creating this delicacy as they wrestled with four down (Flourished with craving for bacon 6), arose from their seats, swore, peeled a squashed BR double-round from the seat of their trousers and cast them into the bin before ever savouring the unique mix of wool pinstripe, compressed ham, mustard, butter and Mother’s Pride.
How Fisher herself fell upon the idea is anyone’s guess. Her wartime cookbook, How to Cook a Wolf, includes a prune roast. Cowardice has, so far, prevented me from trying it but I, for one, am not sure I’d be that pleased about letting anyone rustle up a batch of Railroads for high tea knowing that prune roast had earlier featured as the plat du jour. Serendipity and mobility are the abiding leitmotifs in sandwich history. Without the carelessness, and/or drunkenness, of a Nile-dweller who mixed ale instead of water into a dough mixture in around 3000 BC we wouldn’t have leavened bread; brewing and bread making developed symbiotically; the commonest Egyptian ale, haq, was produced by soaking partially baked red barley loaves in water for a day or so until they fermented (a sound historical reason why the patrons of the Castle Arms might find Margaret’s plain cheese and ham sandwiches hit the spot with a pint).
In Exodus 12, Yahweh, unimpressed by these new-fangled breadstuffs, potent symbols of Egyptian decadence and Israelite oppression, tells Moses and Aaron to get the tribe to feast upon roasted lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, once the whole shenanigan of daubing lintels with said lamb’s blood is finished with. And after the Avenging Angel had had its way with the Egyptian firstborns, the Israelites, fleeing in haste, began their journey to the Promised Land with unleavened bread, remembered at Pesach in the Sedar and with the banishing of chametz from the home. The precise rules for the Pesach observances were given to Moses during the Israelites’ second year in the wilderness of Sina’i. Yahweh was not, however, quite as exacting as possibly he could have been, as, perhaps, in the same position we can conceive Bill or Bob would have been. At Numbers 9:11, Moses is told that the Pesach offering should be eaten ‘with matzah and bitter herbs’; in Hebrew this is written as ‘al matzot u’marorim but ‘al’ literally means ‘on top of ’. Faced with this textual ambiguity, the great Rabbi Hillel proposed that the meat and bitter herbs be stacked on top of the matzah in what became known as the korech. The open-topped sandwich was then officially born to commemorate a swift departure after years of enforced confinement; a couple of thousand years later, passengers on British Rail could only munch into their luncheon meat and cress sandwiches and yearn for such a speedy deliverance.
1 British Rail catering did not escape the beady eye of Elizabeth David. In a chapter on Toast in English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), David berates BR for charging 12 pence a slice for toast when a 12-slice white loaf at that time cost a mere 15p.