To say that my grandfather was an unadventurous eater would be a tremendous understatement. He was, in the vernacular of the day, a ‘martyr to his dicky tummy’ and, throughout his life, whenever a food gave him ‘the pip’ he’d expunge it from his repertoire forever. By the time he died, he was surviving entirely on a diet of weak tea and sandwiches – supermarket sliced bread and Shippam’s Beef Spread.
Looking back, there are two reasons for this. Pop Ron’s was not a generation that bothered their doctors lightly, so he’d never have received an early diagnosis of gastric reflux, IBS, diverticulitis or Crohn’s disease. It was just the sort of thing one lived with.
He was also part of the worst generation in British history for eating. He was born in a Welsh mining village and as a child watched it destroyed by the Depression. He spent the war as an intelligence officer, debriefing young Canadian bomber crews who’d been shot to pieces over Germany, then spent the rest of his working life as the headmaster of an underfunded state school in a devastated urban sink. His generation didn’t care for food much and in his case this was exacerbated by an entirely justifiable and deep-seated anhedonia.
I, too, in a small way, ended up on the family ‘paste diet’. I’d like to think it was a subconscious act of solidarity with the old man but, truth be told, it was the appalling and intractable conservatism of childhood that meant, through my thirteenth and fourteenth years, I refused almost every food except white bread and Shippam’s Sardine & Tomato Paste.
Meat and fish pastes are still around. They exist in a weird little time warp of forgotten but much-loved Victorian prepared foods along with corned beef, custard powder and tinned meat pies. We should be thinking fondly of them: potted ox cheek, brown shrimp, rabbit and haddock pepper the menus of every ‘modern British’ restaurant in the country. They are on-trend signifiers of thrift and authenticity. We should even doff our hats to the cooking method. Pastes are actually cooked inside those little pop-top jars – the same way as the foie gras or rillettes we disloyally rush to buy on trips to French supermarkets.
Of course, you probably won’t be aware of meat paste. Why should you be? It lives on the ‘granny shelf ’ of the supermarket. Right down there at the bottom, just before the pet food, along with the tinned mince, the Camp Coffee and the last bottle of gravy browning. You won’t see it unless you’re moving very slowly, dragging a trolley, bent double with arthritis and trying to work out how to live on the last eight pence of your pension. If you’re a straight-backed shopper of average height, your eyeline will be occupied by overpackaged premium mueslis and jars of artichoke hearts preserved in olive oil – you’re not meant to notice the soul-sapping depressiveness of the knee-height shelves.
But recently I did. I don’t know what made me look down, but there it was, a little tray of the store’s own-brand pastes, and I realised that those two flavours that had run like veins through my childhood hadn’t passed my lips in thirty years. It seemed an amazing opportunity. I instantly recalled the bland suavity of the beef paste and, though nobody knew what it was back then, the genuinely umami jolt of the sardine and tomatoes. How could I resist?
I bought a special loaf for the taste test. I was looking forward to trying these flavours again, expecting some Proustian surge of emotional recognition. I wanted something close-textured and very white to smear them on – something that would replicate the bread I remembered.
The beef paste had a smell I didn’t remember… a non-specific meatiness on the cat food spectrum with a light descant of metallic notes. The taste failed to live up even to that promise, distinguished by nothing but its utter blandness, and I realised that I’d laid it on in a thick curl like some poncey paté. Pop would have spread it thin enough to see the bread through it, then put three-quarters of the jar back in the fridge for the rest of the week. Looking at the ingredients I noted that beef paste now features chicken and chicken skin. It probably did then, too, but now I feel I can actually taste it.
The sardine and tomato paste still smelled as unholy as it ever did. It would incubate in a Tupperware lunchbox throughout a morning of double physics until it smelled like an abandoned fishing smack. Much like Marmite, though, eating it was about sensation more than flavour; a brutal mouth mugging that was somehow fixed in my teenage mind as enjoyable. Now it sat on the bread, the consistency of baby poop and – there’s no other word for it – stank. A mouthful produced just an evanescent whiff of recollection. The ingredients list features mackerel in large proportions. I screwed the lids back on and consigned the lot to the bin. It was then that I noticed that the lids of the jars still bear the same legend they did then: ‘reject if centre can be depressed’, which, under the circumstances, seemed prophetic wisdom.
I felt guilty about my ‘sandwich conservatism’ for many silent years, then, quite recently, two new ideas came to my attention. The first came in the form of a poll of 2,000 people in 2017 by the New Covent Garden Soup Co., which found that one in six people had eaten the same lunch every day for at least two years. The same poll revealed that 77 per cent of workers had eaten the same lunch every day for the past nine months. This was astonishing stuff. Perhaps I might dare believe that I was actually normal. Then, as the entire world started buying up scented candles and cashmere socks and banging on relentlessly about hygge, I found out about matpakke – the Norwegian packed lunch.
To understand matpakke, you first need to understand a little about lagom. In Sweden, lagom famously refers to a profound belief, at a culture-wide level, in the notion of ‘sufficiency’ – the correct or adequate amount – leading to a pursuit of balance and moderation in everything. In Norwegian, lagom has a subtly different meaning of ‘fitting’, ‘proper’ and ‘reasonable’ – perhaps a more moral interpretation.
Lagom is the motivating spirit in Norway’s national packed lunch. It originated in a system of free school meals launched in 1932 called the Oslo Breakfast (requiring no cooking and supplied free to all – including bread, cheese, milk, half an orange and half an apple). It was simple, unembellished and, as it was a universal provision, proudly displayed an entirely non-competitive standard of adequacy. Rich kids couldn’t get a better breakfast, poor ones wouldn’t have a worse one. The food was precisely sufficient – the purest expression of lagom.
Today the noble ideals of the Oslo Breakfast persist in matpakke. During the state-mandated half-hour lunch break, every worker from floor sweeper to CEO will unwrap a wax-paper package containing two sandwiches and a piece of fruit. Being Norwegian, the sandwiches are open-faced and use a modest single slice of packaged bread each, so a specially manufactured sheet of greaseproof paper (mellomleggspapir) is placed between the sandwiches to separate them. The fillings are simple: cheese, ham, salami, liver paste or jam. It would, after all, be wrong to include any ostentatious condiments – it would be antisocial to produce something that was more pleasurable than that of your colleagues and, in fact, it would be kind of insulting if your lunch was more temptingly delicious than your neighbour’s… if you ‘looked forward to it’ for any reason other than peckishness. I can’t think of any other situation in the world where the driving imperative is for the food to be, well, reassuringly dull.
I can’t adequately express how vindicated I feel by matpakke. My stubbornly narrowed choice of lunch as a boy wasn’t lonely or mad; it was innovative, egalitarian and praiseworthy. It’s probably time we thought like this a little more.
Have you ever dragged yourself from your desk, through rainy streets, stood frozen by indecision and guilt in front of a large ‘grab-’n’-go’17 fridge, plumped for the same awful, over-mayo’ed, troublingly moist, nine-month-shelf-life, gas-flushed monster sandwich as yesterday, then queued for ten minutes to be plundered of a fiver?
Have you never thought what a complete relief boring simplicity might be? Then you, too, my friend, have dreamed of matpakke.
If I had to choose a desert-island meal or a last request on Death Row, I can say, without having to ponder for too long, that it would be the sandwich. There’s something honest and uncomplicated about the sandwich. At its simplest it’s a lump or slice of something slipped between two bits of bread to facilitate its transit to the mouth. The story that it was invented by the Earl of Sandwich when he needed something he could eat quickly and cleanly without leaving the card table is almost certainly apocryphal, but, like all good origin myths, it makes so much sense that it no longer matters. The sandwich is the ultimate logical food, evolving automatically out of hunger, convenience and an absence of formality.
Americans have long understood the sandwich. There are counters in Manhattan where the combinations of fillings, seasonings, breads and condiments are so numerous and complex as to be, to all intents and purposes, infinite. At some Jewish delis, sandwiches containing stacks of sliced meats weighing up to a kilogram (more than two pounds) are served by legendarily surly staff. An inexperienced diner is confused as to whether they should try to eat it and fail, or set up a series of base camps and plan the assault over days. Cognoscenti ask for a doggy bag.
That being said, we in Britain could lay claim to be leaders in the world of sandwiches. According to the estimable British Sandwich & Food to Go Association, the first fully packaged, pre-made sandwich was sold by Marks & Spencer in 1985. Today, the UK’s pre-made sandwich industry is by far the largest in Europe.
This should be exciting for sandwich lovers, but it’s a more complex story than it at first seems. The same august body estimates that 43,000 tonnes of chicken, 16,000 tonnes of cheese, 15,000 tonnes of ham and 14,000 tonnes of egg are consumed by the sandwich industry each year yet, as we have already seen, we respond to this ridiculous display of choice and constant novelty by making the same selection every day, like children returning to a knackered old bear or blanket for comfort and security.
Once I could have wandered into any half-decent sandwich bar and ordered one to my exact taste; today, although I apparently have more choice than I’ve ever had before, it seems that I can’t.
The pre-made sandwich is now such a complicated, multilayered and exotically flavoured thing that it’s worth, just occasionally, reminding ourselves of the basics – the platonic archetypes of the sandwich world – and how, when done right, they can still be the very best.
In the British repertoire, cheese is the OG sandwich. An agricultural worker, lopping off a chunk of cheese with his pocketknife and sticking it in a piece of bread torn off a loaf, is an image that pre-dates the supposed invention of the sandwich in art and literature. And rightly so, because mature Cheddar on a thick slice of crusty white farmhouse bread is still something that transcends all attempts at commercial innovation.
Because it’s the simplest combination, the details of each separate element become vitally important. The cheese doesn’t need to be artisanal or particularly distinguished, but it has to be cheesy. Mild or medium Cheddars – what the supermarkets insist on primly rating as ‘1’ or ‘2’ strength – are ‘textural’ cheeses. Intentionally bland. Designed to provide a waxy layer of bulk in a mixed filling; to be grated and melted; to be gummed by small children and the weak-minded. Aged Cheddars, like people, get salty, sour and a hell of a lot more interesting. They are also drier, which is why the choice of butter is key. Both salted and unsalted butter work well but should be chosen depending on the saltiness of the cheese and should be laid on thick.
In commercial sandwich making, butter is what’s called a ‘barrier’. It’s used to waterproof the bread and stop the juice of tomatoes or other wet fillings from soaking into the bread and making the sandwich soggy. Depressing, isn’t it? Noble butter reduced to a kind of greasy sealant. In a cheese sandwich, though, the butter really matters. It isn’t applied in a coy smear to prevent the undesirable mingling of incompatible elements, but as a thick layer; a vital constituent in what the professionals would doubtless term the ‘flavour profile’.
Usually, the bread should be white. Commercial white bread is quite sweet, and a lovely counterbalance to the salty/sour cheese, whereas a sourdough, though it looks better on Instagram, takes the entire sandwich too far into the sour end of the spectrum. I have a personal soft spot for a cheese roll that used to be served at the famous vegetarian restaurant Cranks. It was an early British artisanal loaf in the ‘healthy bread’ idiom of the time. Wholemeal flour, a good helping of sweetening malt, a handful of scouring seeds and a little molasses. It combined sweetness with nuttiness… not perhaps as rigorously, classically austere as it could have been, but picking up beautifully on the nutty notes in the emphatically rustic Cheddar. Bless them, but I suspect that back then they hadn’t worked out that cheese wasn’t necessarily fully veggie-compliant. More innocent days.
You can, of course, add to the cheese sandwich. A slice of raw onion has historical precedent as a ‘relish’, but I can’t help feeling that if the sandwich needs perking up like that, it’s either been poorly made or the diner has become jaded. Pickles are even worse… an extra, punchy layer of sweet and acetic flavour stamps all over the subtlety of the basic ingredients in combat boots. Don’t get me wrong, cheese and pickle is a lovely combination in which the waxiness of the cheese leavens the punch of the pickle, but you can make one of those with a No. 1 or No. 2. Indeed, ‘cheeseandpickle’ is a sandwich filling in itself, in a whole different category.
When we speak of a ‘cheese sandwich’ today, we imagine the saddest, most minimal option on offer. Three miserable layers of over-processed, homogenised rubbish without distinguishing features, defined by all the things it could be but isn’t. But a proper cheese sandwich gives infinite opportunity to blend and balance salt, sweet, sharp, sour and umami just as surely as a bowl of ramen or an exotic masala.
The French, perhaps predictably, understand this faites simple approach well. They revere the jambon beurre – the bestselling sandwich in France and one that makes best use of their high-standard baguettes. Note the name, though. It’s not a ‘ham baguette’, it’s a ‘ham and butter’. Like our own, dear cheese sandwich, copious butter is a feature player.
A cheese sandwich is largely about flavour balancing, but in a jambon beurre, texture is brought into play. Once you’ve bitten through the crust, the main experience of a cheese sandwich is soft crumb. In a jambon beurre, by design, every bite has crust. The French are rightly proud of their crusty baguettes, and the ham, predominantly supplying saltiness, and the unsalted butter, providing an emollient mouthfeel, have evolved as the perfect balance to the crisp/sour outer casing.
There has to be something in this structural development because, when the British finally got round to formalising bread and cheese, it was as the ‘ploughman’s lunch’: Cheddar cheese with a ‘French stick’ – British white bread in a baguette shape.
The sandwich is an admirable vehicle for proper philosophical and gastronomic analysis of good ingredients. Foie gras needs to be spread on brioche toast to be truly appreciated by privileged connoisseurs, but, at the other end of the social scale, the magnificent complexity of boiled crab can’t really be enjoyed until it’s wrangled from its bony matrix and smeared on triangles of brown bread. Preferably in bare feet and within yards of the ocean.
Recipes for the cucumber sandwich expend thousands of words on the precise seasoning of the vegetable and the choice of butter. You can stick some sliced cuke in white bread and cut the crusts off, but it’s the grace notes that make it a masterpiece – and that’s before you spend hours happily considering its cultural role as a class signifier, a social lubricant in novels and a music hall joke. The simplest sandwiches contain the most.
My personal favourite is a tinned corned beef sandwich on a medium-sliced split-tin loaf. For this you need a small-town bakery. They bake the loaves on site, but they also have a slicing machine. It’s a unique combination that’s worth seeking out because you’ll have the precision of machine-made slices while the bread will be additive-free and fresh. The key to the entire sandwich is temperature. The bread and butter must be at room temperature while the corned beef is sliced straight from the fridge. Warm corned beef is delicious, but its texture is soft and greasy – when cold it has additional crack and pop. The single-ingredient sandwich is like a fine artist’s economic line. It expresses a lot with what appears as minimum effort, and it concentrates the mind wonderfully.
I’ve always found it profoundly sad that the corned beef sandwich isn’t better understood and therefore more honoured. It is as fulfilling and aesthetically perfect as any more fashionable sandwich… hell… if we could just get people to Instagram corned beef on white sliced the same way they do an artisanal Katsu Sando, it could be just such an international phenomenon.18 The corned beef sandwich can only ever be improved by one thing… a generous dressing of salad cream, whereupon it transcends the everyday ordinariness of its name; like a BLT it deserves its own acronym. Behold, then, the ‘CBS’.
My great-grandfather had his name on the front of a chip shop on Kingsland Road in Bristol. In a fairer world, it wouldn’t have been there. My great-grandmother inherited the place from her family, but it was the way of the world back then that they should put her husband’s name over the door – John Chillcott, known as Jack. The building’s been gone for decades now, and all we have is a single photograph of him, taken in 1913, blinking in the daylight outside the dark little emporium. My nan, his daughter, could still remember the place – eating out of newspaper as a kid, sitting up on the counter. She made the best chips I ever tasted – carefully chosen potatoes, washed, cut, mysteriously dried under a tea towel in the fridge, then fried twice in the ‘chip pan’.
This pan was actually the bottom half of an old aluminium pressure cooker, the size of a bucket and with a wire basket that, to my appalled childish fascination, was usually set in a solid block of flecked ivory fat. I don’t think a day ever passed when the chip pan wasn’t used, so there was no need for anything as worryingly modern as refrigeration. The fat was boiled up every day, constantly replenished by the melted scraps of anything with a high lipid content, so it was a rich, characterful brew of dripping, lard, possibly butter, oils and, lord be praised, any fat remaining from the daily breakfast bacon.
My mother wasn’t keen on chips. She was of the generation of new women who wanted little to do with unhealthy, heavy, old-fashioned foods. Dad, meanwhile, a diligent young insurance loss adjuster, seemed to come home at least twice a week, shell-shocked from another chip-pan fire. These happened all the time, in family kitchens just like ours, when the hot fat boiled over, caught on the gas flame, ignited the 100 per cent man-made-fibre net curtains and spread to the expanded polystyrene foam ceiling tiles.
Mum feared chips would eventually kill us all; Dad had actuarial figures proving that chip fat would finish us all off even sooner. It just took one small flare-up, quickly and correctly suppressed with a damp tea towel, before Dad carried the entire apparatus to the bin. I must have been about eight when we became a chipless house and I had to skulk to Nan’s for a regular fix. In hindsight, Nan’s chips explain my entire life. They were so good I’d probably have eaten them with anything… even liver… but they were best in a chip butty.
No one has ever been able to explain why a chip butty is so good. It shouldn’t be. I mean, it’s so minimal. So zen-like in its simplicity. A chip is a potato. Just spud. And the only addition to it is some undistinguished fat, a bit of Maillard reaction and salt. Surely if you stick that between two slices of bland white bread with butter, there can be no way it can exceed the sum of its parts. It makes no sense! And yet… and yet.
I reviewed a restaurant in Trondheim once – a tremendous place with the most amazing food from their own farms. They were obsessives, with a fourteen-course tasting menu that changed every day. On the night I went there was a potato dish: a pancake made from a particular kind of potato grown on the farm; a potato that grew small in the hard, cold earth, which was stored to dry and ferment a little and cooked in an extraordinarily simple and traditional way to give the cleanest and most intense experience of potato possible. It was staggering. It didn’t just ‘taste of potato’, all the sub-elements that combined to imply potato-ness were individually isolated and amplified.
Perhaps we lack the philosophical tools, the conceptual apparatus, to really comprehend how in a chip butty the bread binds the chips into the perfect mouthful; how the butter, melted by the hot chips, lubricates the mouth and floods the flavours out over the tongue and its receptors. A food scientist might call it mouthfeel; a philosopher might point to memories of childhood or even the transgressive nature of something so resolutely un-improving; a sentimental writer might find poetic nostalgia in it. Somewhere, I’m sure, there’s a food critic prepared to take a Marxist perspective and say that it combines the simplest foods of the urban proletariat in a glorious ‘fuck you’ to the bourgeoisie. For me, like that potato pancake, the chip butty uses bread and butter to amplify all the things that make a chip a chip and presents them to your mouth in a way you can’t fail to appreciate. I bet the Japanese have a word for it.
There are some foods – incredibly popular favourites – that actually don’t have recipes. I know… that sounds odd. But consider this: if you go online and search ‘recipe chilli con carne’, your screen will fill with hundreds of thousands of variations, tweaks, twists and ‘takes’. You will also learn, within a few clicks, that there is no ‘original’, there is no master recipe… in fact, nobody in Mexico would even call it ‘chilli con carne’. I lack the correct ontological terminology for something that weird. It’s an idea, a concept, commonly held by about half the population of the world, none of whom will ever agree on what actually constitutes it. The Americans have lifted a term, ‘foodways’, from the jargon of folklore research, so perhaps that’s appropriate to the phenomenon of the crisp sandwich.
I confess that, for many years, the idea of a crisp sandwich simply appalled me. There is nothing inherently wrong about the combination of flavours – a crisp sandwich, after all, can’t taste much different to a chip butty – but it was the textural challenge I couldn’t face. Soft bread, a soft filling and a flavoured crisp seemed to be too outrageous a combination. Then, one day, appearing on the panel of a radio show about food, I shared my reservations with a live audience of about 300 people who, not to put too fine a point on it, howled me down. I had never before managed to provoke such ire… even when discussing the order in which to apply jam and clotted cream on a scone in Cornwall, or suggesting the inclusion of avocado in a stottie in Newcastle.
This was a way of eating I’d not encountered. It didn’t feel part of my culture and I could find no written recipe or original source, so I began asking friends, colleagues and the great hive mind of Twitter. It immediately became clear that crisps in a sandwich raised partisan fury, innumerable ferociously defended combinations and a full set of prejudices. This was an authentic ‘foodway’.
One highly respected food historian swore that the addition of crap crisps was the thing that made a cheap, gas-flushed sandwich edible in emergencies; a household-name celebrity chef endorsed only Hula Hoops in sandwiches; and the most significant food publisher of her generation recommended ham and cheese plus a particular brand of square crisps that tessellated elegantly between the layers.
Some swore that the crisps should remain whole until the first bite, some maintained that anyone who was not a complete barbarian would crush them until there were finger marks in the bread. Some claimed the superlative combination was salt and vinegar crisps with egg mayonnaise, others swore that combination was the only one that could induce a full gag reflex. What was amazing was the level of highly directed, white-hot passion around the idea, along with a complete inability of any two people to agree on how it should be done. I had to try it.
I bought the sandwich in a supermarket. It seemed to me that my personal issues with textural contrast would be most aggravated with a firm crisp and a sloppy filling, so I chose a simple cheese and ham, on brown bread with butter but no mustard or pickle. It seemed reasonable to expect the crisps to stand in for any condiment. Acquiring the crisps required more effort. I drove to three petrol stations before I found two bags of Salt & Vinegar Squares, and it took twenty minutes to persuade the attendant that I didn’t require the free bucket of Diet Coke he offered with them.
I drove my ingredients to a quiet spot I know, behind some lock-up garages on the edge of town – it seemed the right sort of location – and began my experiment. I dissected the first half of the sandwich and crushed up the first bag of crisps before opening them. I had recently been fed a variety of outré toppings by chefs… crumblings of nuts, drifts of dried fish flakes, seaweed dusts and sprinklings of ‘baconetti’… I figured crushed crisps could be classified that way and somehow out-manoeuvre my palate. It tasted pretty grim. Processed cheese and reassembled ham-trim overlaid with a redolence of chip fat. It was time for the real thing.
I separated the elements of the second sandwich and spread them on the passenger seat. I carefully tessellated the crisps between the ham and the cheese where the butter couldn’t soften their crunch and gently reapplied the lid. I took a huge bite out of the corner and began to chew. The texture of the crisps gave context to the flavour, and the flavour really did go some way to redeeming the dire awfulness of the sandwich itself. Emboldened, I squished the remainder a little, leaving some discreet finger dents in the bread and listening with horror to a sound not unlike the bones of an ortolan when crushed by the tongue.
It was not appalling.
I texted my publisher with the details of my complex purchases and the authentically sleazy location of my experiment…
‘You bought a supermarket sandwich?’
‘Well… yes.’
‘You dolt! You should have made your own.’
I think I have more work to do on the ‘crisps in sandwiches foodway’. I understand that the failing is in myself. Somewhere, I know, there will be a combination that will entirely reset my attitudes. Until then, here is the short list of suggestions I keep in my notebook, which I know I must work through. I will, of course, be grateful to receive any more you might want to add.
‘Good’ is an important word to food lovers. Writers of a certain era employ it like a verbal tic (‘use good butter or a splash of good olive oil’); we read The Good Food Guide or BBC Good Food Magazine. ‘Good’ implies a simplicity: honest, straightforward ‘rightness’. We define ourselves as aficionados by our willingness to seek out the good; through diligent selection of the best, most arcane or novel ingredients; by innovative preparation methods; and by the virulence with which we reject the bad. But, increasingly, I’m finding myself troubled by one devastating contradiction: by far the majority of the food out there that moves and inspires us as much as it nourishes is not ‘good’ at all. It’s rubbish. If we’re really to be food lovers, we have to acknowledge the importance of the bad.
For better or worse, most avowed food lovers don’t know hunger. We might get a bit peckish occasionally, we might inflict a little austerity on ourselves when the trousers tighten, but we have the power to fix things before genuine, gnawing hunger bites. Hunger, though, rewrites our value system when it comes to ‘good’ or ‘bad’ food. To a starving man, any food is good, just because it’s food.
The definition of ‘badness’ in food is so mutable, so specific to circumstance as to be functionally useless. The closer you get to an empirical definition of badness, the more it eludes you – Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Rissole, if you will.
The uncertainty, though, is useful, enabling us to reposition bad food as it suits us. In the UK, for example, we are deeply conflicted about ‘nursery food’. Nursery food is ‘bad’ because it’s prepared in such a way as to remove any polarising tastes or flavours. It is neutered, dumbeddown and fed to the intellectually and sensually unformed. We use words like ‘pap’, ‘pabulum’ and ‘baby food’ pejoratively, and yet the emotions attached to childhood food are incredibly strong. It was served, usually, with more genuine, unconditional love than we’ll ever experience again in our lives. Quality, even if we had the power to discern it, was immaterial, so is it any wonder that, in later life when we need to forgo adult cares and responsibilities and trigger deep feelings of being wanted and cared for, we call for dreadful ‘comfort food’?
The mass-market hamburger is held up by food lovers as the exemplar of all things vile. The cheapest cuts of intensively farmed beef, ground to the point at which they can be eaten almost without chewing, served in a bun that is nothing like bread, with a thousand-year shelf life, under a shroud of ‘cheese-like food product’ and a sauce made of sugar syrup and nuclear waste. Yet, in one form or another, the burger is one of the most popular foods in the world.
As you read this, there are maybe half a million people worldwide chomping into a burger with no redeeming feature apart from a texture that doesn’t challenge them to chew, and they’re loving it. They think it’s delicious. It warms and nourishes them. It makes them very, very happy. Your Big Mac, your Whopper or indeed your KFC, Taco Bell or Subway are designed to be the way they are based on the constant feedback of millions. I have no wish to get all Jeremy Bentham here, but it’s bad food that provides the maximum amount of joy for the maximum number of people. When it comes to the gaiety of nations, fourteen-course tasting menus and ‘nourish bowls’ of kale and avocado don’t even cause a flicker on the dial. By this logic, the Big Mac isn’t ‘bad’ at all; it is, in the truest sense of the word, perfect.
Our attitude to bad food is in many ways peculiar to the UK. All across America, in even the most advanced and metropolitan cities, there are diners and tiny independent joints selling exactly the same ‘special recipe’ junk they’ve been slopping out since the 1930s. Cheesesteaks, sliders, barbecue, bowls of execrable ‘chilli’ and primordial split pea soup, all made from commodity ingredients and slammed onto the counter in front of delighted customers, from out-of-work welders to local political big shots. America has stayed true to its authentic ‘bad food’ in an unbroken line because it recognises bad food as a cultural asset and sees no shame in enjoying it. The UK diner equivalents have passed away unnoticed and unmourned, so today, if you want our national ‘fried breakfast’ in a big city, you’re much more likely to get one painstakingly reconstructed from ‘good’ ingredients in a recently opened brunch venue than in an original greasy spoon. We, it seems, need to mediate our badness into good.
Consider, for a moment, the ‘hangover breakfast’. Chefs, writers, critics – drinkers, all – attribute almost magical powers to the food they eat the morning after. The bacon roll with brown sauce, the mighty ‘full English’, a bowl of packet ramen or even what chef Thomasina Miers recently called the ‘little red ambulance’ – a can of Coke. It’s a near-comprehensive list of the wrong, the forbidden and the scorned in the enlightened western diet, and yet to hear them speak, many of our most qualified commentators have at some point enjoyed these bad foods more than the outstanding stuff that fills their menus. Has alcohol destroyed their palates and their judgement? Not at all. Forget the Jesuitical gymnastics. Forget the strenuous post-rationalisation. Expert people say bad food is great… and they’re right.
I’ve wondered for a long time how to properly demonstrate to enraged food lovers that their pursuit of perfection, their slavery to arcane and high-quality ingredients is but one quite boring facet of foodism – how to prove to them the importance of really bad food – and I realised that, in the end, the answer would have to be a recipe.
It’s very important that we understand that this is not about irony. A goddamn down-home pulled pork BBQ sandwich made with rare-breed pork on a brioche bun is NOT bad food, it’s irony. It’s great food slumming. It’s nostalgie de la boue, but it’s not properly bad food.
To prove my point, the following recipe must use undistinguished ingredients, it must be prepared without cheffery, without tricks or trucs, without being ‘transformed’ by molecular voodoo, and finally it must be irresistible so that even the most exquisite of gourmands will wolf it down, without demur and unlubricated by irony, and weep with delight.
Grab yourself two slices of appalling bread. This must be the white packaged stuff from the corner shop. Processed bread is the way it is because most people like their bread soft and ‘easy to eat’, so it is barely baked. For a truly ghastly experiment, take the rest of your loaf and ball it up in your hands. Within seconds you’ll have pushed all the air out of the slices and formed a large ball of undercooked dough. Packaged bread is made palatable by the addition of plenty of salt and usually a fair whack of sugar. Butter your two slices thickly.
You’ll need two kinds of bad cheese. The French and Italians like cheeses that get runny and go off, but we thrifty Brits and the canny Americans favour the process of ‘cheddaring’. The cheese is squeezed dry, salted, ‘milled’ through a machine and pushed out in blocks with a much-extended shelf life. Commodity block Cheddar is a fantastic way of utilising milk surpluses throughout the year. Grate a handful of the stuff, of if you want to go the whole nine yards, buy it pre-grated.
Add the Cheddar to a handful of grated bad mozzarella. Not the premium kind made from buffalo milk and packed in whey, but the solid, rubbery brick, made with cow’s milk and devised mainly to make pizzas chewy without being too interestingly cheesy.
Mound a pile of the mixed cheeses on one buttered slice, top with the other, lay a cutting board on top and squeeze down. You will find that the assembly squishes pleasingly.
Slather the outside of the sandwich with mayonnaise. Avoid the low-fat versions – you want the kind they use by the litre in the commercial sandwich industry as a throat lubricant.
Fry the sandwich over a medium heat in a dry pan. The oil in the mayonnaise will provide the frying medium while the egg content, such as it is, will create a sort of omelettey crust. The sugar in the bread will caramelise a little and, when the cheesy centre is fully molten, flip the whole thing onto a plate to serve.
In most matters of food and bread, the American diner or deli is well ahead of us. While we were still cutting the crusts off triangular cucumber sandwiches, they were creating the Reuben and the Muffuletta, achievements far more impressive than merely putting men on the moon. But with one particular creation they seem frankly to have run off the rails – it is a sandwich that’s become so confused and messy that it needs the calming hand of the Old World to bring it back to the straight and narrow. We’re speaking of the Monte Cristo.
The original idea of a Monte Cristo seems pretty simple. It was a slice of boiled ham and a slice of cheese, pulled from the grillman’s mise en place, slapped between two slices of bread and dipped in egg wash before being fried gently in butter. It was a lovely thing. A warm, soft capsule of ingredients, convenient to eat and with a faint hint of the noble Italian mozzarella in carrozza. Suggestions, too, of the croque-monsieur, but without Gallic faff or pretention. This, though, was not enough for breakfast lovers of the US.
It made plenty of sense when cooks decided that the ham could be replaced with sliced turkey, perhaps to create a pork-free option. It was forgivable, too, when a pickle was introduced – who could deny the grill monkey a little jeu d’esprit – but then things went crazy. Perhaps it was an error in interpretation, but at some point, America got the idea that ‘Monte Cristo’ referred to the method of encasing, and they felt able to go entirely off-piste with the contents. I’ve been served a fried chicken and bacon jam Monte Cristo… a Vietnamese ham and liver spread Monte Cristo from one well-intentioned fusionist… elsewhere avocados have been introduced.
I’m by no means conservative in matters of taste, so perhaps these might have survived, had it not been for one thing. One final, ridiculous step that took a fine sandwich into the realm of the surreal. Americans are used to serving ‘French toast’ for breakfast, made with a sweetened batter, enriched with cream and topped with syrup or a dusting of cinnamon sugar. In all these cases of bastardised Monte Cristos, the sandwich element was dipped in sweetened French toast batter and served with a sweet topping!
Words almost fail me.
So, as a gift to the people of the United States, I’d like to offer a corrective recipe. Something that completely resets the standards. We need to get back to the absolute basics of what makes the Monte Cristo brilliant and then we can agree to forget all the other nonsense that’s gone on in between. C’mon. This is America’s hour of need.
That the bread must be soft and white shouldn’t really be a matter for debate. We need something that’s going to absorb some of the batter for richer flavour and better texture, so a decent commercial white sandwich loaf without any artisanal pretentions. This is, in engineering terms, a neutral matrix for the egg and a container for the ingredients, so socking great irregular air bubbles will just destroy the structural integrity. Cut a slab two-slices thick from the loaf.
In this particular recipe, the crust is useless to us. We don’t need it to hold the bread together and its difference in texture will just create confusion; so slice it off and you should have on your board a rectangular cuboid of uninterrupted and entirely even, soft crumb.
Using the point of your knife, cut into one side of the bread to create a pocket. It should be a single cut, in such a way that you have two slices of equal thickness, still joined on three sides. Pause for a moment to admire your handiwork.19
Now you can very carefully introduce a little butter into the pocket and smear it around a bit, followed by a piece of smoked ham. You need something dry and properly flavourful… maybe a Westfälischer Schinken, the closest we can get in Europe to the secret and illegal ‘country’ hams of the Appalachians. Now we need cheese. It needs to be something that melts prettily and, if we’re to follow our strategy here fully, it should be the only thing in the sandwich with a possibility of conveying sweetness. A Gruyère would do the trick, or a Comté if you’re feeling cheeky. Slip that in alongside the ham. This is the time when, if you were some sort of crazed iconoclast, you could slip in a slice of raw onion, a couple of thinly sliced cornichons or, for all I know, generous slices of freshly foraged black truffle… though you would, of course, be dead to me if you did.
At this point, if you’re feeling terribly cheffy, you could also store your sandwich, uncovered, in the fridge for a couple of hours. This dries the bread out and slightly increases its absorptive capacities – it is just a tweak, though… a refinement purely for the obsessed aficionado.
Now make up your egg wash. It’s important that we refer to it as ‘egg wash’ because I’m convinced that it was regarding it as a ‘batter’ that got the Americans into this mess in the first place. Thoroughly beat a couple of large, fresh eggs with a little milk or cream. This is important for a complex chain of reasons:
See? Complicated, huh?
Once you’ve made your egg wash you can dip in the sandwich. It is entirely impossible to suggest how long it might be allowed to soak as tastes vary, as will the absorbency of your bread, but you must persist. Make a Monte Cristo often and you will fine-tune your own technique.
There is only one thing we can all completely agree on as empirical, verifiable fact: the sandwich must now be fried slowly in ample butter. Keep the temperature low enough initially that the butter doesn’t scorch. This also extends the cooking time, giving the cheese time to melt and the ham time to donate its fatty benison to the surrounding bread.22 Once the outside of the sandwich looks well set, any milk solids will have been absorbed, so the heat can be turned up to brown the sandwich without burning the butter.
The true beauty of this sandwich is that the soaked bread is as much the star as the filling. Once you get the hang of really letting it soak and timing the cooking to just set the egg, it has the texture of a sumptuously cheffy mousse or parfait.
They say that good things come in small packages, which is probably true, but better things come hot, in small packages sealed with egg and fried in butter.
OK. I think we’ve got this cracked. Our work here is done. Now we can hand it back to the Americans with happy hearts.
There are often terribly complicated origin myths for American diner sandwiches (see The French Dip) involving battles for the ‘intellectual property’ of a particular combination and tall tales about kitchen ‘mistakes’ that turn out to be blockbustingly popular with the punters. Almost anyone who’s ever stood on a diner line and built a sandwich or flipped a burger will know these tales for the fabrications that they are. Most of the great ‘inventions’ spring automatically to hand from the standard diner mise en place when the cook is bored or has run out of something vital.
The patty melt is claimed to have been invented by Tiny Naylor, owner of a chain of eponymous diners in Los Angeles, at some point between 1930 and 1950. This may well be entirely true, but let me take you through the process and you can be the judge.
Imagine you’re working in a diner, with all the regular accoutrements in front of you. Take one of the patties you use for a burger and lay it on the griddle to brown both sides quickly. Butter both sides of two slices of the rye bread you use for a Reuben. This will be what they call ‘light rye’. A standard, packaged sandwich loaf that has just the faintest hint of brown fleck in it and an evanescent hint of caraway – the merest memory of Central Europe, a ghost of the shtetl but not enough to scare the horses. Lay the bread on the griddle, brown one side, then flip it. Top both slices with Swiss cheese (also from the Reuben ingredients), then place the patty on one slice and a handful of caramelised onions from the burger set-up on the other. Close up and finish as per a grilled cheese sandwich.
That last bit is the key. Don’t think you can get away with just building a cheeseburger with toasted bread instead of a bun. This is, as they say, ‘a whole ’nother thing’. It’s the way the cheese combines with the onions, melts into the bread and glues the lot together into a coherent mass that makes it a patty melt. Like a Philly cheesesteak but, if it’s possible to comprehend, improved.
The thing is… it’s bloody lovely. I don’t know why everyone isn’t eating patty melts all the time instead of poncey ‘gourmet’ burgers as big as your head. If Mr Naylor wants credit for this, he’s more than welcome because this is a blessing to all humanity. All the loveliness of cheese, the crispy exterior of fried rye bread… it’s almost better if your patty is a bit thin and undistinguished. Truth is… you can make a patty melt with a crummy pre-made burger and it will be good. You can even do the damned thing in a sandwich toaster. They say there are places where you can get a layer of Thousand Island dressing squirted in, but honestly, I think that might be too much for my tiny mind to comprehend. Can you imagine the joy?
A couple of decades ago, the Brits talked about sandwiches about as much as they do about their wages or their sex lives. A sandwich was something you did at home, in private. Sticking something like cheese, ham, Marmite or jam between two slices of bread was a serving suggestion and certainly not a culinary phenomenon.
If you wanted a sandwich for lunch you went to one of dozens of urban sandwich bars, usually Italian-owned, sometimes doubling as a greasy spoon breakfast joint, where you could choose your bread and your filling and watch the thing being made and wrapped in front of you.
Then, several key events happened in rapid succession. If you are so inclined, these can be read in a low voice, with dramatic background music in the manner of a true conspiracy theory:
In the spring of 1980 Marks & Spencer begin selling the first pre-made sandwiches out of chilled display cabinets in their stores.
In 1982 the milling company Molini Adriesi, in Verona, invent the ciabatta loaf.23 Made with an extremely wet dough, it creates a light, soft-crust loaf that’s the perfect size for a couple of single-serving sandwiches. It also toasts superbly.
In 1985 Hans Blokmann, technical director of packaging supplier Danisco Flexible Otto Nielsen, invents an ‘easy seal’ package. Marks & Spencer begin using it immediately. In 1985 Marks & Spencer also begin baking ciabatta in the UK.
In 1986 Pret A Manger begin their unstoppable rollout across the UK and, eventually, the world.24
Today the UK sandwich market is worth £6.25 billion (about $8 billion) per year, or 3.25 billion sandwiches25 – that’s the kind of interest and disposable income of which Ronald McDonald could only dream in his most fevered acquisitive fantasy. New sandwich shops should have sprung up everywhere offering a choice of fillings and a choice of breads, but instead our most convenient food has become a ‘convenience food’.
Today very few shops make your sandwich in front of you or allow any degree of customisation. The chains assemble their sandwiches in their own kitchens and independent suppliers now take advantage of large production companies with a well-organised supply chain. Even the most remote petrol station or corner shop seems to sell a standard selection, delivered to them daily and probably made only, at worst, a day or two before. To keep them at optimum quality, most sandwiches are sold from temperature-controlled ‘grab-’n’-go’ units – not strictly refrigerators, but contraptions that ensure ‘the product’ stays within a safe ‘temperature window’ from the second it’s made to the moment you open it to eat.26
It’s hard to deny that people love sandwiches this way. They love the assured freshness, they love the guaranteed quality and consistency and they love the ‘choice’ they are offered of sometimes dozens of carefully researched flavours. One could argue that a cheery shop assistant, standing behind a counter packed with ingredients and asking you what you want in your bap, would give you all those benefits and more, but those businesses seem to have been drowned in a lumpy tide of ‘crayfish and rocket in a lemon mayo’.
There is, though, one unexpected benefit to the mass sandwich industry and that is the panini. Yes, I know it should be a singular ‘panino’, but this is the odd thing – what we now call a ‘panini’ all over the world has very little to do with Italy and a lot to do with a particular combination of equipment and ingredients. For many years, Italian delis and sandwich shops had ‘panini presses’ in which any regular sandwich could be toasted. When the ciabatta arrived, it was found to be particularly good when toasted, but things got even better once commercial bakeries started offering their customers ‘bake-off’ bread.
Bake-off bread is partially cooked, just to the point that it is fully risen and the crust has set, and then it’s flash-frozen. The original idea was that shops and supermarkets could install a fan oven in which they could place the bake-off loaves, straight from the freezer, and offer their customers ‘freshly baked’ bread. It was a terrific idea and spawned a bread-based arms race amongst high-street shops to have the most delicious baking smells piped out of their doors as a kind of olfactory advertisement. (I interviewed a French chef who said that the defining experience of the UK was getting off the Eurostar and walking straight into the overpowering smell of bread.)
It didn’t take sandwich sellers too long to discover another advantage of bake-off bread, though. You don’t have to bother with the expensive fan oven. If you make up a sandwich with the half-baked loaf, you can finish it in a panini press whilst melting the filling. Soon the bakeries responded with purpose-made ‘panini’ bread – white, dense, in single-serving sizes and shaped a bit like a medium-sized espadrille but with a marginally less pronounced flavour profile. The perfect vehicle.
Of course, you can’t have lettuce, or arguably even tomato, in your ‘panini’ – but you can make them up by the dozen and hold them in the fridge. Any half-skilled member of staff can whip them out and slap them into the jaws of the panini press and the result is… well, it’s really quite good. Sure, it bears the same relationship to a gorgeously crafted toasted sandwich as baked beans do to a cassoulet… but we’re talking about snack foods here and, as we’ve established, baked beans are damn good in context.
It’s actually possible to buy reasonable bake-off baguettes in a supermarket. I think they’re designed as emergency standbys for the kind of people who fear they might have to whip up a dinner party for six at half an hour’s notice. They are made by large commercial bakeries but, as is surprisingly possible with this technique, without needing many additives. Actually, freezing half-cooked bread can work extraordinarily well… if you’ve eaten warm sourdough or freshly baked rolls in a quality restaurant in the last few years, you’ve almost certainly been eating bread that was custom-made off-site and frozen for ‘baking off’ later on.
You’ll need lots of butter in your sandwich – you want it to melt into the bread – or you could use olive oil. Cheese is a structurally vital part of a panini, so you’ll need something that has good melting qualities and, perhaps, a bit of stringiness. I usually grate a mix of cheeses with a base of the solid ‘pizza-style’ mozzarella for texture, then something rich to give it body, maybe a Comté, Gruyère, some fontina or even a punchy Cheddar, depending on the ethnicity of my remaining ingredients. Then you’ll need some superb charcuterie – one of those German smoked hams, a finely sliced chorizo, maybe even a smear of ’nduja.
To get the proper corner-shop effect, it’s important to apply pressure to the lid of your panini press at the point when the fats in the cheese and the meat begin to melt. Squeeze until the juices run, then release the pressure and the doughy bread soaks them up like a sponge. You can serve the panini with a salad on the side or some sort of healthy salsa for dipping, but there’s no practical way to get attractive leaves or healthy vegetation into a panini – but then, that’s not the point. It doesn’t really need anything else. This is entirely an exercise in balancing cheese and charcuterie, in getting the right degree of ‘soak’ into the bread and finishing the exterior crust to perfection in your sandwich grill.
I’m not going to patronise you by mansplaining mayonnaise. You know how it’s made, you know the tricks and hints, yours is probably better than mine and we both know that Hellmann’s is pretty damn good at a pinch. We know the importance of mayonnaise, as a binding agent in fillings and as a lubricant to greedy throats. It has been suggested, and only half in jest, that Pret A Manger isn’t actually a sandwich shop but a front for a mayonnaise empire, so promiscuous are they in its application. But we forget too easily that, before they opened their doors to a desperate public, mayonnaise was something extra you had to ask for. If you went into a British sandwich shop, your bread would be buttered – or in extreme cases, margarined – the filling would go on and, if you were feeling a bit adventurous, you asked for the lettuce leaf and slice of tomato that were quietly expiring under the sweaty glass counter. You had to ask for mayo and someone went and fetched the jar, uttering epithets (‘Where does ’e think ’e is… Fifth bleedin’ Avenue?’). We have a lot to thank Pret for… but we’d do well to remember that, BP (the era Before Pret), there was an alternative to mayonnaise. We also had (why do I feel I have to whisper this?) salad cream.
It must have been around the 1980s that salad cream – invariably Heinz – began to disappear from our diet, supplanted by the more fashionable and cosmopolitan mayo. It is fair to say that it was sweet, it was vinegary and it was perhaps a less sophisticated taste, but what is unforgivable is that salad cream was driven off by class pretentions. It was one of those products characterised as ‘naff’ by a generation of food writers and was metaphorically forced out of town by a howling mob with pitchforks. Which is a shame because salad cream is (again, whisper it) really nice.
Fresh mayonnaise is one of Escoffier’s mother sauces – a complicated emulsion that takes a cheffy hand to create and with a subtle taste. It’s there to provide a smooth texture, to lend richness, but, of its very nature, it’s not supposed to intrude on the delicate flavours of the food over which it’s carefully drizzled. It’s basically an egg yolk as an emulsive base for as much ‘good’ oil as you can coax it to take, with a touch of vinegar to cut back the richness and a hint of mustard. It is not a robust thing. And it was never the right thing for the classic English salad. Salad cream, on the other hand, is an inversion of very similar ingredients. Start with a hard-boiled egg yolk, rubbed through a sieve, and a generous dollop of English mustard, ferociously sharp and yellow with turmeric. Begin by beating in a bland oil – rapeseed is great – until you start to get a mayo-like thickening (a lot easier with the hard-boiled yolk), then add a similar amount of double cream. Damn right! Double cream. Talk about richness. Season with lemon juice, white pepper and salt.
Away from the bottle (which, as I remember it, always had a kind of collar or pie frill of rubbery, dry, old sauce just below the cap), salad cream is a game-changing addition to your sandwich ‘practice’, a yin to mayo’s yang and a blessing on humanity. Make a batch and try it anywhere that mayo is mentioned in a recipe. Its more pronounced flavours will wake up your ingredients where mayo simply evens them out into homogenaity.27
I spent years in pursuit of the perfect tuna salad. Years wasted simply because, as it turned out, I was facing in the wrong direction. The best tuna sandwiches I remembered were in a particular diner in San Francisco where the counterman would take the stuff out of a stainless-steel tub with a big ice-cream scoop. He’d dollop two perfect hemispheres of it onto a slice of brown bread, leer every time, at some internal Benny Hill sight gag, and then smush the top down with a second slice.
The bread had to be American brown sliced. An entirely weird product that had some of the cues of British brown bread – a vague tan and chippings of bran – but was also definitely and emphatically sweet. I’d suggest molasses, but it was probably nothing so natural.
The idea should have been simple: mayo and tinned tuna with a few minor embellishments. And so I set out to replicate it. I started with decent tinned tuna steak in brine and a properly made mayonnaise, and it tasted of nothing. I started upping the seasonings, adding grated onion, garlic powder, Old Bay Seasoning… all the usual suspects of the diner’s store cupboard, but nothing would wake it up. I added lemon juice, which was revolting. Fruit and fish? Was I mad?
I began to cut back the mayo. Surely by reducing the bland condiment I could make it taste of something?
I’m not saying I suffered any kind of crisis of faith here. I didn’t sit in the corner of the kitchen weeping like a fallen priest… but this took place over several years and it was a bloody long time to waste chasing a sandwich. Eventually I remembered something. At a place I’d worked in in another part of the States – OK, I’ll come clean, I was covering shifts in a small correctional facility – the ‘chef ’ had made the tuna salad in an industrial kitchen mixer. What if… what if I was heading the wrong way?
I bought a very large cheap can of tuna chunks. Still sustainably sourced (I’m not a barbarian), but a cheaper cut of less-pretty meat. Most importantly, this was the oily stuff. Oily and strong-tasting, plus it was poached and packed in oil. I confess it reminded me a little of cat food as I poured it into the mixer bowl and turned on the paddle, but if we were going back to first principles, this was the way to start. The meat broke up quickly and began to combine with its own oil, so I began to pour in the mayo. Reader, it drank the stuff like a man in a desert. I just kept pouring and it kept absorbing. This was how Joël Robuchon must have felt the day he realised that he could get more butter than potato into a serving of mashed potato. Even unseasoned, a spoonful drew Proustian tears.
I don’t use the mixer any more. A big can of tuna will drink a dustbin full of mayonnaise and even I can’t shift that much, but it reversed my approach to tuna mayo altogether. Don’t go ‘premium’ on the fish – you need strong flavour. Keep your ‘ventresca’ for your salade Niçoise. But, above all, understand that this is about a great deal of mayonnaise. Today, recalibrated and centred on firm foundations, I can tweak and build with abandon. I like some sharp little nonpareil capers mixed in. Chopped spring onion is no bad thing. I can get all arty with Espelette pepper in a knowing tip-of-the-beret to the Côte d’Azur; minced, pickled pimientos for colour, finely chopped celery for texture and crunch. Last week, I even chopped in hard-boiled egg, and it was still a thousand miles ahead, in a direct line, from the tuna salad du temps perdu.
There are many reasons to love Heston Blumenthal – not least, the kind of enthusiastic forensic nerdery that made him deconstruct the simple hamburger in In Search of Perfection – but even he went too far, I would argue, in attempting to recreate sheets of yellow ‘burger cheese’. Burger cheese, sometimes known as ‘American cheese’, is regulated by the FDA under US Code of Federal Regulations Title 21 (Food and Drugs), Part 133 (Cheeses and Related Cheese Products). It can contain a blend of cheeses (solid or powdered), cream, milk fat, water, salt, artificial colour, oils and spices that is emulsified, set into sheets and individually packaged. This can be called ‘pasteurised processed cheese’ if it contains more than 51 per cent cheese products by weight. If less is present, it’s labelled ‘pasteurised processed cheese food’ and, let’s be honest, it’s still bloody gorgeous.
Heston judiciously combined premium cheeses with a chemical widely available in pharmacies as a treatment for cystitis28 to create a cheesy sheet that melted properly, but the question every burger lover screamed at the screen was: ‘WHY?’
We know that ketchup is a noxious mix of sugar syrup, colouring, MSG and vegetable extracts, yet we do not mess with it. Further, almost all chefs acknowledge gladly that only one brand of tommy K matters in spite of its industrialised manufacture and uninspiring ingredients. It is a sui generis condiment and as such is respected and left alone.
I shall not rest until burger cheese is afforded the same honour. It is a barbarous, manufactured commodity with no redeeming features, dietary or aesthetic. It is also a perfect condiment, in no need of improvement and not to be deconstructed… it just happens to come shrink-wrapped in plastic and set in rubbery sheets. Just regard it as such and use it as freely and without guilt as you would tomato ketchup.
Which brings us, inexorably, to the tuna melt… a sandwich so weird that most Brits refuse to believe it actually exists. A sandwich that has to be explained and, even then, provokes incredulity, fear and loathing.
To begin with, the tuna melt involves fish and cheese, which, in pretty much any cuisine anywhere in the world, is a complete non-starter. And yet somehow it survives… nay, thrives.
To make a tuna melt you’ll need some truly awful brown sandwich bread. Nothing with any proper nutritional value. You could, if you were aiming to be clever, go for something artisanal, but be aware that the slight sweet maltiness of the packaged stuff is key here. If you go for something virtuous, make sure it has some kind of molasses content.
You can use the tuna salad discussed previously as filling, but the really savage amounts of mayo make things a little indigestible. Though a diner would just slop on the standard tuna salad mix, I’d counsel something lighter on the mayo and stretched with a little vegetable matter. Celery is vital. Certainly some finely minced onion and maybe some sweetish red pepper for colour and general virtuousness. Some add a splash of vinegar to sharpen things up, still others chop a gherkin finely and run it through, which has a similar effect. Dammit, it’s so healthy it’s almost a salad.
Put the bread slices through a toaster first, then mound one slice with the tuna mixture and smear the other liberally with mayo. Now it’s time to add the cheese. Most diners will offer a choice of cheese on a burger: ‘American’, the odd yellow stuff we’ve already discussed, and ‘Swiss’. This is not, as one might hope, a fine, cave-aged Emmental, but ‘American Swiss’, which is a rindless, pasteurised and processed cheese, sweeter than the standard yellow wax and sometimes graced with one or two decorative holes. It will never have been near Switzerland and nobody has dared to ask the Swiss how they feel about it.
You can choose freely what you’re going to top your melt with, at least between these two options, but it’s important that you don’t drift off-piste and use anything like a ‘proper’ cheese. Because here is the most important thing to remember… fish and cheese really don’t go together, and a tuna melt only works because tinned tuna doesn’t taste much like fish and processed cheese doesn’t taste much like cheese. This is the key to truly understanding the tuna melt.
Drape your chosen ‘cheese’ over your mound of ‘fish’ and place both pieces of toast under a grill. The cheese will melt – don’t allow it to brown or even much more than bubble – and the top piece will ‘fry’ a little as the oil in the mayo heats up. Put on the lid and serve.
The truth is, it’s rather lovely. Once you realise that it’s not really supposed to taste too much of either of its constituent ingredients, you’re safe to enjoy one of the greatest and most misunderstood comfort foods.
Another deceptively simple, classic sandwich filling is what the Brits call egg mayonnaise and the Americans call egg salad. It is, of course, easy to smash up a couple of hard-boiled eggs in a squirt of shop-bought mayo, but that is to miss the infinite subtleties of one of the finest and most luxurious things you can place between slices of bread. Bear with me here. Not the homogenous eggy slurry they pipe into the sarnies at your local corner shop, jam into triangular cardboard boxes and then stick on the shelf at the far end, just so those people who come in every single lunchtime but still can’t pluck up enough courage to experiment will find something utterly, utterly bland enough to suit their pusillanimous lack of moral or sensual fibre. That stuff is miserable.
I am talking about the real deal. At the estimable St. John restaurant, where chef Fergus Henderson effectively established the rules for proper eating, one of the most popular lunchtime snacks is an egg mayonnaise sandwich, made with their own sourdough bread, spankingly fresh free-range eggs and homemade mayo. If you know the routine, you can take your sandwich up to the bar, where a modest tip to the barman will produce a couple of cured anchovies. The barman lifts the lid of your sandwich and drapes the fish over the mound of egg and something entirely magical happens.
As mayonnaise is made of egg and oil, you could argue that putting it on an egg is like putting ketchup on a tomato, but this would be to miss the point. Good egg mayonnaise is about the eggs expressing their egginess. I don’t mean in a comedy, fart gag, stink bomb way. I mean the kind of voluptuous richness of a fine custard, a perfectly executed omelette or hollandaise.
You need to start with excellent hard-boiled eggs, which, in itself, used to be a problem. For many years, with eggs being of varying sizes and methods for cooking varying wildly, the general wisdom was to boil the things for ages… well, at least ten minutes… and then let them cool. This indeed produced an egg with a hard yolk, but the yolk was usually covered with a layer of depressing grey and the whites the texture of long-boiled squid. Different chefs swore by different methods, but there was little science.
It could surely not be beyond the wit of man to create an algorithm that took into account the starting temperature of the egg, its circumference and, therefore, the ideal time in which it needs to be immersed in boiling water. Actually, the maths turned out to be so easy that several bright young people created apps for mobile phones into which you can enter the data and set a timer. I favour an app called Egg Master, which, last time I looked, was entirely gratis and has resulted in several years of successful egg mastery on my part.
Today we can be much more selective about the textures in our egg mayo and true greatness is within our grasp. In a traditional egg mayo, the dry yolk would absorb great quantities of mayo. Now we can plan to leave the yolks just short of completely solid so that they create moisture themselves and reduce the amount of mayo needed.29 It’s subtle, but it shifts the balance of flavour from the mayo to the egg.
I take four free-range eggs that I know to be good and fresh and measure their diameters using the app. They haven’t been kept in the fridge, so I can assume that their current temperature, from shell to core, is the ambient temperature of the kitchen, which I measure with a thermometer and enter into the app, too. The app tells me I need to cook the eggs for six minutes and thirty-seven seconds, so I lower them into boiling water and set the timer running. As the alert pings, I run the eggs under cold water to immediately stop them cooking.
Next I make up an egg’s worth of mayonnaise. Personally, I like it with lashings of mustard and quite a pronounced lemon flavour so that it really is pretty indistinguishable from the salad cream we talked about before. You can, of course, use a decent shop-bought mayo or even regular bottled salad cream. Add the mayo (or salad cream) to the eggs a little at a time, mashing them roughly with a fork. Don’t overdo this. You need to see serious chunks of white and one or two noticeable chunks of undisturbed yellow yolk. For me, this is enough, once salt and pepper have been adjusted, but American recipes often add finely minced celery, paprika or even grainy mustard. They may have a point.
I think egg mayo works best on a really rustic sourdough, chewy of crust and with enough sourness to scare off amateurs. This is solely a personal thing and it relies on the egg mayo being anything but bland. Have faith that the egginess of your ingredients will carry through and don’t fall back on bland bread.
Kewpie is a Japanese brand of mayonnaise, different enough from our own to be instantly better in many dishes. Even the highest-quality pre-made mayos in the west contain quite a quantity of water along with whole eggs, distilled vinegar and sugar. The idea is that the condiment should supply a pleasant mouthfeel, with the individual flavours so well balanced that there’s nothing polarising in any particular direction. The whole point of a thick smear of Hellmann’s is that it enhances what it’s served with, so if you eat a spoonful by itself, you’ll be unlikely to distinguish egginess, much vinegar or any trace of mustard.
Kewpie is also made with soya bean oil, and it uses only the yolks of the eggs, along with rice vinegar, which is a little sweeter than distilled, no extra water and some MSG. Some people feel that Kewpie is more like salad cream than mayonnaise – not, as we have already established, a problem for me. I personally find that Kewpie tastes more like a fresh mayonnaise that I’d make to my own taste… more egg, vinegar and mustard.
It’s the Kewpie that distinguishes the tamago sando – the cult egg mayo sandwich found in konbini30 across Japan.
Shops like 7-Eleven, Lawson and FamilyMart stock all kinds of pre-made snack food, but the tamago sando is served in all of them, without exception. It has, somehow, become as defining a sandwich of the Japanese takeaway world as the cheese and ham is to our own.
Like any sando, the tamago requires shokupan bread – white, light and largely without redeeming features. The eggs are cooked carefully to be just the tiniest bit short of fully set and then blitzed almost to death with lots of Kewpie mayo and a little sanshō pepper. The egg salad component is almost a smooth paste, with perhaps just the smallest hints of cubed white providing texture, but the finishing touch is a halved egg placed in the middle of each sando, buried in the egg salad. It may have something to do with its success that a tamago sando looks so completely adorable when cut across (and Instagrammed…), or it may be that the hyper-eggy Kewpie mayo, with all the component flavours singing out, can do the impossible and improve on the perfection of the Western egg mayo sarnie.
Some classic sandwiches are a clean canvas for cheffy creativity. It’s rare, these days, to find a club sandwich that doesn’t have a ‘twist’. Sometimes it’s avocado, sometimes a flavoured mayo or a grating of some interesting cheese; occasionally it will be an artisanal bread, ‘curated’ by the chef to enhance locally sourced ingredients; some feature fried chicken, house-cured bacon… and one or two of them are actually pleasant. But nobody – thanks be to whichever gods oversee the kitchen – messes with the BLT.
It’s possible that this is because of the name. ‘Bacon, lettuce and tomato’ is fairly prescriptive. Any supernumerary major ingredient messes with the billing. ‘Chef Nigel’s bacon, lettuce and tomato with cheese’ doesn’t work. It’s marvellously self-limiting. But there’s another reason. Put simply, the BLT – precisely as it stands – is the perfect sandwich.
I don’t use the word ‘perfect’ lightly. It should never really appear in a book of recipes because, in the normal run of things, it’s just not possible to give written instructions for something that’s full of an impossible number of variables and is, ultimately, entirely a matter of personal taste. There is no ‘perfect beef stew’, because my perfect is not your perfect and there’s no way we can make it the same on any two occasions anyway. The BLT is something different, though. Its origin, history and the unique combination of ingredients mean it constitutes a kind of ideal. The BLT persists in its pure form because, in principle, it is as close to perfect as a sandwich can be, even if our executions may fall short on occasion.
The bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich begins life in the American diner some time after 1900. There are one or two recipe books that suggest sandwiches a bit like it, but the purest form isn’t mentioned. It’s perhaps too simple and obvious to please a publisher. But to anyone who’s ever worked the counter at a diner, it’s entirely obvious how the sandwich came into being. As we saw with the invention of the patty melt, everything on the diner menu has evolved from the restrictive combination of the equipment (the griddle or hotplate) and the mise en place (the range of cheap ingredients that the cook sets up at the grill station at the beginning of each shift).
If a hungry driver walked into any diner across the US from 1900 onwards and asked, ‘Can you make me a sandwich?’, the grill monkey would reach for the sliced bread, grab a few rashers of the bacon left over from breakfast, take some tomato and lettuce from the garnish pots and finish it all with a flourish of mayo. The fastest combination. The cheapest ingredients. Nobody ‘invented’ it any more than they could patent the idea of sitting around a fire, banging out a rhythm and dancing. It just happens from the stuff that’s there. This is the root of the BLT. A kind of form-follows-function, pared-to-the-bone ‘rightness’ that underpins everything.
Because the BLT is a diner staple all over the US, it has one other phenomenal advantage. It has been served, consistently, to the most powerful and effective focus group in food history. Diners are democratic dining institutions, largely untroubled by class distinction and populated by hungry people who want decent food fast and affordably. The cooks buy ingredients regularly, cook to order and respond instantly to customer feedback. The best consultants in the world could not come up with a better, broader and more robust system of product development. For over a hundred years this sandwich has stayed, in every real sense, the same. People have, in their millions, made the choice to return to it – chefs have tried variations but returned to it, owners have probably tried to cut corners but always… always returned to the one, pure, true way.
Nobody knows who first called it a ‘BLT’, but it’s classic diner slang. It needs the life experience of a forty-five-year-old career waitress called Blanche, living in a trailer on the edge of town, who’s been on her feet for a double shift, to further reduce the simplest idea to a barked acronym. Dictionaries record the first uses of ‘BLT’ in the 1970s, but it must have already been in common use over a thousand strips of battered melamine in a thousand small burgs for decades.
Like any good meal, a classic sandwich must be balanced, and the thing about a BLT is that it’s almost impossible to mess up the balance. Bacon is the key protein here, but it would be wrong to think of this as a garnished bacon sandwich. The combination – which, incidentally, is foolproof – is everything.
The bacon shouldn’t be anything special. Diner bacon would be chosen for the most cost-effective combination of medium-sliced, medium-smoked, enough fat for the fat lovers, enough meat for the fat-avoiders. You could, if you chose, favour back or streaky, smoked or unsmoked, but you’d be closer to the original if you had a mix of everything.
The tomato is as vital to the mix as the bacon. In a diner, they’ll choose big, flat-ended tomatoes so that they get the maximum number of slices, preferably big enough to be used singly, thus cutting down on faffing during assembly. A diner owner would really like tomatoes to be foot-long cylinders because they hate throwing away the ends. We, on the other hand, are sophisticated enough to know that they should combine sweet, sharp and cold in order to counterpoint the hot, salt and fat of the bacon.
The iceberg lettuce might well be the most reviled vegetable in history. Admittedly it has little flavour, but there are plenty of other vegetables that don’t blow your head off, so why do chefs and food writers tap so deep into their bile reserves for this innocuous ingredient?
It’s probably something to do with its history. There are all sorts of stories about the origin of ‘crisphead’ or iceberg lettuce… from the suggestion that it was developed at the turn of the twentieth century by growers in the north-west of the US to be more resistant to the cold and have a longer growing season, to the story that they were the first lettuces robust enough to be packed in ice and shipped from California all across the United States.31 It’s certainly true that they have a tremendous shelf life, both in the shop and at home in the fridge, that they have few nutrients in their anaemic leaves and that in the 1970s they became demonised in battles over the working conditions of immigrant field workers in California (still the largest producer of lettuce outside of China).
Iceberg, with its highly commercial history and technologically advanced supply chain, is as far from the ideal of gathering a few simple leaves with a trug in the garden and tossing them in a light dressing as it’s possible to imagine. Iceberg was the first ‘salad’ many ordinary urban Americans ever saw and then it was likely to be hewn into quarters and coated in some terrifying proprietary dressing… which may go a little way towards explaining why American food icon Craig Claiborne started an effective personal crusade against it or why Alice Waters declared it ‘plebeian’.
The problem, of course, is that iceberg is great. Blue cheese dressing needs a structural framework, a Big Mac needs a layer that at least attempts to look green, something’s got to support the prawns in a cocktail… these are all the noblest of duties in the eyes of any but the most doctrinaire food elitists. And the most glorious and perfect use to which iceberg can be put is as the ‘L’ in the BLT.
A leafy cos or butterhead lettuce would be overwhelmed. A frisée might intrigue, but it would be too bitter and would pull messily out of the sandwich instead of yielding to the bite. Romaine is leathery, Little Gem too sweet or too assertive in its lettuciness.
Iceberg, chilled from the fridge, is the foil to the hot, fatty bacon – it resists its influence, refusing to wilt – and support to the mayo. Weirdly, iceberg is the only part of the BLT that admits to variation. You can shred it, apply it as separated leaves or slice the whole damn head across into thin ‘lettuce steaks’. Of course it hasn’t got as many nutrients as a handful of baby spinach, mesclun or kale… but really, if you need to go to your bacon sandwich for vitamins, you’re already way beyond help and should probably be incarcerated in a spa somewhere having orange juice and cod liver oil shot up your bottom hourly.
Now to the key element of the sandwich: the bread. It must be white because all the delicious nut, caramel and malt notes of a brown or wholemeal loaf would be entirely wasted or would confuse the purity of the main tastes. It must be machine-sliced to be in correct proportion to the filling – yes, I know a sourdough doorstep looks terrific on Instagram, but unless you can unhinge your lower jaw like an anaconda or you’ve been gifted by the food gods with a flip-top head, it’s going to make ‘getting the sandwich into your mouth’ the main focus of your eating experience rather than ‘enjoying it’.
The bread must be toasted – this has always been the way. It may, originally, have been a way of using up bread that was just past fresh, or to ensure that the bread didn’t get soggy, soaking up mayo and tomato leakings while it sat on the pass waiting for the waiter to pick it up. You could declare that the toasting adds a certain Maillard caramelisation to the bread, but I’ve never been able to detect it. More important is the fact that the lovely bronzed colour that cheap sliced gets in the toaster is at least partially a product of its higher sugar content. Crappy sliced white is quite sweet, which balances the salty bacon as if calibrated on a vernier scale.
Assembly isn’t complicated, but certain rules must be followed. Combined in the wrong way, the ingredients of a BLT can be soggy, limp and unfulfilling, so building the sandwich is about combining the hot and cold elements – straight from the pan or fridge – so that they maintain separation and balance. Fat, salt, sweet and blandness must blend while the whole construction crunches in all the places it can crunch.
Fry the bacon while lightly toasting the bread, then put it to one side. Quickly flash one side of each toasted slice through the hot fat left in the pan. This adds to the flavour and also goes a little way towards making the slice waterproof and resistant to sogging. As soon as it’s out of the pan, slather the fried side of each slice with mayonnaise. Use a knife if you wish, but as you should be using the ready-made stuff, it’s easier to just pipe it on from a squeezy bottle. Making your own mayo would be beyond pointless.
Lay down the bacon first, then ample tomato and the iceberg. This order is vital, as it keeps the tomato, the main source of dampness, away from the toast. Nail the sandwich shut with cocktail sticks – holding it together in such a way that you don’t need to smush the top down with your hand. By doing this, the ingredients retain lightness and separation, they look great and they’re not forced into combination until the diner is ready to pick it up and squeeze it into his or her mouth.
Slice the sandwich across diagonally once – a BLT comes as two halves, only clubs come in quarters – and serve opened to show the cut face. Do not serve with chips; a BLT is a self-contained meal. For similar reasons, do not attempt to add superfluous salad as a ‘garnish’, or even a pickle. You can, if you’re just desperate to mess with perfection, throw down a handful of crisps, but it’s hard to see why you’d feel the need.
There are some phrases in the food world that carry an emotional import that’s out of kilter with their simple meaning. ‘A bowl of soup’ carries no more semiotic load than you’d imagine at first sight – it’s a bowl with soup in it – but say ‘pot-au-feu’ to a Frenchman or ‘full fry-up’ to a Brit and you evoke a complex structure of beliefs, feelings and loyalties.
There is one term, though, for which I suspect the effect is international. Could there be two more evocative words than ‘room service’?
I’m sure you, dear reader, are a jet-setting habitué of the world’s finest hotels and so for you the memory may be lost in a haze of luxury, but I remember with astonishing clarity the first time I ordered room service.
My sister was PA to an Australian TV executive and a team of them were staying at the George V in Paris on some kind of terrifyingly important sales drive. Somebody had left a vital tape in the London office, so little Sis called. ‘Grab your passport, pick up the tape and deliver it to the hotel this evening. I’ll arrange a room for you but stay in it. Order room service. Be gone in the morning.’ To be clear, there was nothing in the delivery transaction itself that required such cloak and daggery; it was simply that, at that point, I’d just escaped a provincial art college, was living in a truly repugnant Peckham squat and looked, not to put too fine a point on it, like a roadie who’d been fired for poor personal hygiene.
Room service was a split of champagne and a club sandwich and was, predictably, sublime. But through the long years and numberless hotels (of varying quality) since that first experience, I’ve realised that the appeal of room service is not actually about the excellence of what’s served.
Chefs hate doing room service. Some of the best restaurants in the world are located in grand hotels and kitchen facilities are often shared. Cooks are never overjoyed to be pulled from prepping a three-star dish in order to knock up the sort of Scooby Snack you might assemble while drunk and serve it with a side of fries. Punters, on the other hand, couldn’t be more delighted by the idea of kicking off their shoes amidst all the froth and frippery, cranking up some dreck on cable TV and lying in bed eating something that is guaranteed to be 100 per cent delicious and unchallenging.
Chefs know – and loathe the fact – that you can’t mess with the room service classics. Substituting a homemade mayo for Hellmann’s might give you a chance to shine in front of your boss, but lemon mayo, pesto, toasted brioche, avocado, sumac or any one of a million possible ‘twists’ or ‘takes’ on the chef ’s behalf will result in the thing being left outside the door, untouched under its crumpled napkin.
If you travel a lot, room service becomes a touchstone almost as important as home cooking. It’s easy to feel lonely and deracinated in a hotel room, a deep anomie induced by the rigidly corporate surroundings. In such an environment, tiny personal rituals become vital. Room service can be elevated to an almost religious rite by waking up late with no meetings to attend and a medium–severe-grade hangover. At this point, the peace – the feeling of being completely self-contained while a frenzied world runs mad around you – approaches the monastic.
I’m not entirely sure a club sandwich actually works without room service. I suppose it might be appropriate on a terrace by the side of the pool, perhaps as a snack in the bar, but it seems intrinsically bound up in hotel-style service.
I suppose if you did follow the BLT method but included an extra layer of toasted bread and some sliced poached chicken breast you’d have a facsimile, but you’d just know there was something amiss. It’s not just that a BLT is cut into triangular halves and a club into quarters, it’s everything that this preparation implies – the hassled counterman, halving one with a single stroke of the knife, the commis chef titivating the other onto a plate, garnishing it and covering it with a cloche to be rushed to your room.
If you ever find yourself at a loose end, light the fire, pour yourself a glass of something and curl up with a copy of the EU standards for ‘7.5kg fish blocks’. I’ll grant you it might not be as compelling as The Old Man and the Sea, but it’s a darned sight more relevant to our consumption of fish.
Most fish these days are processed at sea within minutes of being caught. They are gutted, filleted, sometimes skinned and, if they can be sold to a restaurant or fishmonger who’s keen to make a spectacular display, the fillets will be frozen individually and intact. But for most of our fish needs – the breaded Filets-O-Fish, goujons and princely fish fingers – there is a different process. The boneless fish flesh is packed into a mould or ‘frame’ and frozen into a block measuring 482 x 254 x 62.7mm (19 x 10 x 2½ inches) with a standard weight of 7.5 kg (or about 16½ lb).32
There are different grades of fish block available. Top-notch ones will contain whole fillets of a single species of fish. These can sometimes contain ‘voids’ where the fillets don’t pack precisely, so the process of packing can be more expensive and labour-intensive. Easier to create are the slightly lower-grade blocks in which smaller pieces of fish are used up. Simplest of all, and cheapest, are blocks made of minced fish where the size of the piece doesn’t matter and different species of white fish can be mixed.33
Fish fingers are made by sawing the blocks into pieces and coating them in breadcrumbs – so you can see that a good-quality, expensive one means you’re getting a large piece of cod or haddock, perfectly preserved, seconds from the sea. You can certainly argue that mixing the catch and avoiding waste of smaller or less-attractive bits of fish can make fish fingers terrifically sustainable. You can also appreciate how some ‘commodity’ fish fingers can be so frighteningly cheap.
Fish fingers were invented by the prolific American inventor and entrepreneur Clarence Birdseye and were first trialled in the UK in 1955. There was a huge market for cheap and easy protein during Britain’s postwar austerity and Birdseye ran trials in Southampton and South Wales on frozen, ready-to-cook herring sticks. Herring was plentiful and extremely nourishing, but the researchers had failed to take into account British squeamishness around the smell of cooking fish. Customers, they were surprised to discover, turned up their noses at the herring sticks, but they loved the control product in the test… a stick made entirely of bland cod.
Today, for better or worse, the cod fish finger is seen to represent the British diet: loved for its convenience, its ease of cooking, its unchallenging flavour and the fact that it can be cooked almost entirely without smell. Neighbours with more advanced food cultures and a healthier relationship with fish stand frankly bewildered… and yet…
There is something indefinable, something innately glorious about a fish finger sandwich that simultaneously subverts the humble origins of the fish stick and raises two fingers to haters in the wider world of gastronomy. And what elevates the fish finger sandwich to glory is the sauce.
You can, of course, make your sarnie with mayonnaise or some kind of pre-made tartare sauce, and that would just be extraordinarily delicious. But what we need here is something that takes the blandness of the finger and the soft, smooth canvas of the thick-sliced white bread, and paints upon it a complex and profoundly moving masterpiece. Something creamy, rich, spiked with acidic notes, fragrant with herbs and fulfilling enough in texture to be a dish on its own. What we need is a gribiche-y tartare!
Tartare is a sauce specifically recommended for fish. It’s made on a base of mayo with the addition of vinegar for sharpness, chopped capers for sourness and tarragon for additional flavour. You’re also quite likely to find it in a plastic pouch in your chip shop. Gribiche, on the other hand, is a nobler and more complicated thing. It’s traditionally been applied to cold meats and perhaps for that reason it caught on in British cuisine far more firmly than, for example, its cousin, rémoulade.
Start with four hard-boiled eggs and remove the yolks of three of them. Rub the yolks through a sieve and then make them back into a paste with a tablespoon or so of Dijon mustard. Now you can start stirring in olive oil the way you would with a mayonnaise and, indeed, you’ll soon see it begin to emulsify and build volume, becoming glossy and smooth. I’d usually keep going until about 250ml (9fl oz) of oil has been sucked up. If your olive oil is particularly aristocratic stuff, you can always substitute something like rapeseed oil instead, or even some crème fraîche for half of it.
Now you have your base, which will somewhat resemble the salad cream described. Now it’s time to transform it. Start with a handful of finely minced capers and cornichons. Vary the proportion as you see fit, but be aware that the cornichons contain a fair amount of liquid and are pretty vinegary… adjust the rest of your seasoning accordingly. Add finely chopped tarragon (and chervil if you can find it). Finally, break up the remaining egg and egg whites with a fork into rough chunks, stir them into the mixture and adjust the seasoning once more.
This will produce a substantial bowl of gribiche – far more than you need for the sandwich, but you will find that, if it’s half as good as it should be, the adjustment phase will go on for quite a while and you’ll be doing it with a large spoon. I’ve yet to find a restaurant where gribiche is served as a starter with a couple of bits of sourdough toast, but it’s only a matter of time.
Some people would add just an evanescent wraith of fishiness to the gribiche with an anchovy or two crushed in at the beginning. It’s a brilliant, indeed a defining touch. But we know of something better, don’t we? Something delicious, just mildly fishy and supplied in a convenient, breaded finger shape.
Butter a couple of slices of soft white sandwich loaf. I wouldn’t go for the pre-sliced stuff… things are going to get messy here, so you need thick slices of something with dimensional stability and strength in the face of wetness. Smear a thin layer of gribiche-y tartare on the bottom slice, then lay on enough fish fingers to plank it right across. I know some people cut the fingers in half laterally, but I honestly feel they just lack courage in their convictions and should probably consult a qualified counsellor or perhaps a priest. Now spoon on a really very substantial layer of the (inadequate word) ‘sauce’. A pile, in fact. A small mound. The sort of size you could bury a Viking king in… with all his retainers and his plunder… and his boat. Then perch the second slice on top. If you get this bit right, you should be looking at a side elevation like a VW Beetle with a mattress on the roof rack. Cut in half very carefully, serve with due ceremony and eat over the sink.
The fish finger sandwich might be resolutely British, but it has a singularly exotic cousin in the katsu sando, a Japanese street-food sandwich of similar vintage to the fish finger, which has recently gained international recognition and fashionably cult status.
As often happens with incoming cultural phenomena, the name originates outside the Japanese language and has been cheerily adopted. ‘Katsu’ is short for katsuretsu, meaning ‘cutlet’, and sando is, well, self-explanatory. The cutlet element is a piece of pork or chicken, beaten out and panéed in panko breadcrumbs. It’s served with a shredded white cabbage slaw and dressed with two sauces. Tonkatsu sauce (‘Bull-Dog’ brand is best), which is something between a thickened Worcestershire and standard chip shop brown sauce, and Kewpie, the favourite Japanese mayo, which as discussed earlier is a little like salad cream, and is also laden with extra MSG. All of this is served between two slices of shokupan.
Shokupan, or the slightly sweeter version called Hokkaido milk bread, is the favourite sandwich loaf of Japan (we saw it earlier in the tamago sando). It’s made in a similar way to regular white bread but enriched with an egg and powdered milk. Though it uses yeast, it’s based on a tangzhong, a sort of cooked roux. It’s an unfamiliar process to most western bread makers, but it creates a dough that can hold a lot of gas during cooking, becoming fluffy without getting chewy.
Bread is thought to have been introduced to Japan by the Portuguese in the mid-sixteenth century – the Japanese pan comes from the Portuguese pão – but it remained a bit of an oddity until during the Meiji period (1868–1912) when bakers near naval ports began making double-cooked bread to provision ships and the process quickly industrialised. Shokupan – literally, ‘eating bread’ – came into being after the Second World War, when the US began supplying large quantities of wheat and powdered milk to a nation that had hitherto built most of its diet around rice.
Shokupan, really the very definition of mass-produced packaged bread, is now so much part of the childhood of modern Japanese food lovers that they have the same fondness for it as we have for the loaves we grew up with, and have elevated shokupan to their own, extraordinary food pantheon. In 2019, the Japanese electronics company Mitsubishi launched a remarkable high-tech toaster, which closes entirely around a single standard slice of shokupan and toasts it to rigorous perfection, keeping track of colour, temperature and humidity in the chamber and calculating timings with an on-board computer. You can own one of these astonishing objects for a mere £350 (about $450), though you’ll have to make your own shokupan if you want slices that fit.
The katsu part of the sando is also a comparatively recent immigrant to Japan. It first appeared at a restaurant called Rengatei in Tokyo in 1899 and may have been inspired by schnitzel sandwiches popular in America. It was certainly associated with yōshoku, the trend in Japanese cooking to adapt western recipes.
Today, your katsu will sound all the right hipster bells as it arrives at your table. The pork cutlet will probably be rare breed or Ibérico, the chef will probably have whipped up his own take on sweet tonkatsu sauce and you can only pray he’s had the humility to stick to Kewpie mayonnaise. The sando will be cut in a way that screams out to be Instagrammed but, if it’s any good, the bread will be, by most of the standards we’ve learned to call on, ‘dreadful’.
A brioche or an artisanal sourdough encompassing the crisp cutlet will not provoke soft tears of nostalgia from a Japanese diner, any more than strips of breaded sea bass in a wasabi mayo would in my own fish finger sandwich.
Two cuts of pork are favoured for the katsu. You can slice some fillet (otherwise known as tenderloin), which will give you something incredibly lean, or you can try to replicate the authentic rosu-katsu, which is loin with a large slab of delicious fat along one side. To us, this is a standard large pork chop with the bone and rind removed (some supermarkets sell these as ‘pork steaks’).
Season your meat with salt and pepper, lay it between two layers of greaseproof paper and beat it with a rolling pin until it’s a regular 8mm (⅓ inch) thick. Don’t worry if it looks huge, as it will shrink back a little on cooking. Lay the beaten meat in plain flour so that both sides are thinly coated. Now dip it into beaten egg and then panko breadcrumbs.
What’s really noticeable here is that there are no characteristically Japanese seasonings or treatments involved. No soy, garlic or ginger, no sanshō pepper or ground seaweeds… it seems that the very point of both the bread and the meat inside is blandness. Paradoxically, this is not an unusual pattern in many popular street foods. Think for a moment of a Big Mac fresh off the griddle. I defy even the most refined of palates to distinguish any describable taste in the bun, the iceberg lettuce or the patty… it’s the sauce that’s doing the heavy lifting, and in doing so creates one of the wonders of the culinary world.
There’s something about the elegant restraint of the katsu sando that makes me want to rebel. I’m also aware that most of the elements in it spring from western cooking. The breadcrumbed cutlet can be a pork chop, the shokupan bread can be the western white loaf that inspired it, the BullDog sauce can be the bottled ‘brown sauce’ from which it descended and Kewpie mayonnaise does taste remarkably like salad cream.
Heat a large knob of butter in a frying pan until it melts and bubbles, then fry your cutlet until golden on both sides. Put to one side to rest on kitchen paper.
Lay out two slices of packaged white bread, then cut the rested cutlet into diagonal slices and lay them out on one slice of the bread. Squeeze on a zigzag pattern of Bull-Dog (or brown sauce), turn the slice 90 degrees and lay on a zigzag pattern of Kewpie mayonnaise (or salad cream). Pile on a handful of shredded white cabbage, apply the lid to the sando and trim the crusts off neatly.
The Japanese are by no means alone in adapting mass-produced, western-style bread to create something entirely unique. The bread bhaji, or bread pakora, is a popular street food across the northern parts of India and often appears as a canapé at parties or weddings.
Much like a grilled cheese sandwich in a diner, it’s a combination of ingredients that might already be in use in the kitchen for other dishes, but which are infinitely enhanced by frying.
India has a spectacularly broad bread culture, ranging from unleavened flatbreads made from a variety of grains, all the way through to stuffed naan and paratha. Some are best fresh off the hotplate, some need a while to absorb their rich filling or toppings… but it’s hard to see how any of them could be improved upon by the introduction, by colonisers, of a factory-made bland loaf with a long shelf life. Packaged bread, though, soon became popular across India with Anchor, Prince and Modern being the top brands. Perhaps unsurprisingly in such a febrile and creative food culture, it was quickly adopted as an ingredient in home kitchens in other far more interesting ways.
If you’ve never tried pav bhaji, do so now. It’s basically boiled potatoes, mashed and refried with a particular spice mix, or masala,34 fragrant and sour with amchur.35 Peas and perhaps chopped tomato are added and it’s often served from street carts, in hot rolls, dripping with enormous quantities of melted butter. This is in itself a remarkable use of white bread – much to our own disadvantage, we westerners seem too timid about filling bread with carbohydrates36 – but it pales into insignificance beside the bread pakora.
So let’s say, for the sake of argument, you might have some leftover spiced vegetable mix lying around in the kitchen. Surely the simplest thing to do with it would be to cut the crusts off a slice of packaged white bread, spoon some of the mixture on and then fold the bread around it, pinching the doughy material around the edges to seal it. Dip the whole lot in a gram flour batter and fry it.
If you don’t have any leftovers – and, let’s face it, it’s unlikely you will if your family are anything like as greedy as mine or unless you make it in five-kilogram batches – then you can smear the bread with your favourite proprietary Indian pickle and top it with a dollop of plain mash and a sprinkling of garam masala.
This is not, as you can see, a precise science, but it is, I think, the soundest theological argument I’ve ever encountered for pantheism. Pav bhaji and bread pakora are so damned good that one god is an insufficient number to praise for their existence.
Related in many ways to the bread pakora is the Japanese kare pan or curry roll, a popular street food with a weird and convoluted relationship to India. It may seem strange that curry is a popular flavouring in Japan, a country with few historical connections with India, and its voyage is a fascinating one.
For many centuries, Japan was an entirely closed society, interaction with foreigners proscribed by law. There was some cultural intersection with China and a little via the few ports where international trade took place, but even these were highly controlled via national trade monopolies.
It was during the Meiji period that the emperor first attempted various forms of westernisation, introducing more democratic government and outlawing feudal customs – including the Samurai, a class of warriors-for-hire who enforced the rule of feudal lords.37 Emporer Meiji also encouraged the consumption of meat for the first time in what was a largely vegetarian/pescatarian culture – it is said he did so because he felt that Japanese sailors were physically smaller than the British and American seamen now arriving in the newly opened ports. The conclusion was drawn that eating meat was what distinguished these fine specimens and so it was promoted.
Also popular in the rations of the British navy was ‘curry’. Britain occupied India at the time and had taken to eating spicy dishes influenced by Indian cooking. Military doctrine held that curry was not only popular, but a defence against some tropical illnesses. Navy curry wasn’t made with any eye to authenticity, just with lots of the branded ‘curry powders’ that had become favourites amongst returning colonists.
The Japanese navy, following the British custom, began eating ‘kare’ every Friday. The ‘curry’ flavour they adopted at that time has remained a national favourite and is probably the closest thing we’ll ever be able to taste to the colonialist’s version of ‘curry’.
Japanese kare isn’t made with judicious blends of spices, fresh from the dabba, but from a flavoured roux. It can be made from scratch by frying curry powder and flour in oil or it can be bought ready-made in blocks – which need only hot water and a slow stir to turn into a thick sauce.
Kare pan comprises a curried vegetable filling, usually potato, wrapped in bread dough and either baked as a rather sophisticated and glossy bun, or rolled in panko breadcrumbs and deep-fried. As promised, a full circle back to the bread pakora.
The filling is simple. Just peel a few potatoes, a carrot and an onion, and cut them into small dice. Gently fry the onions in a little oil, then add the potatoes and carrot and a little water and simmer gently. Don’t use salt to season, stick to soy sauce. Stir in a large spoonful of the sort of curry powder you wouldn’t use for a curry, but which you might consider for an authentically 1950s coronation chicken. We’re talking school curry here – definitely nothing authentic. Alternatively, dissolve a Japanese curry sauce block in some boiling water and then pour over the vegetables. Continue simmering until the vegetables are soft and the curry is dry. We don’t need anything like a wet ‘gravy’.
Make up a simple bread dough with plain flour, instant yeast, warm milk and softened butter, then knead the dough thoroughly – it’s easiest with a dough hook. The dough should be rested until it doubles in size, then it can be rolled out into discs. Put a spoonful of the cooled kare mixture into the centre of each disc, draw up the edges and seal into a ball if you’re going for buns, or a kind of pasty shape if you want to deep-fry it.
If you’re making the buns, they should be allowed another forty-five minutes or so to rise before egg washing and baking, while the semicircular pasties can be dipped in egg wash and panko breadcrumbs and then given half an hour or so to rest before frying until puffed up and brown.
I grew up by the sea. People always imagine that means a kind of Famous Five childhood of brown skin, tousled hair and endless picnics and, to be fair, there were plenty of picnics. But I don’t remember wicker hampers, roast chickens and tartan blankets on rolling green downs. I remember fighting for a space in a car park and then getting loaded like a packhorse with buckets, bags, Thermos flasks and gallon plastic jugs of sickly squash. I remember Dad sweating and cursing under a mare’s nest of pointy sticks and bright striped neon, wrestling with the windbreaks and, for some reason, a set of plastic boules.
There was never a good spot nearby; it was always over the next endless dune. An interminable hot trek, feet slipping in boiling sand and, unlike Lawrence of Arabia, without a convenient intermission. Eventually our spirits would break before we could find a good spot, so we’d settle for three square metres, miraculously free of dog deposits but not quite far enough away from the couple trying energetically to consummate under a small towel. We slumped to the ground and only then were able to contemplate the horror of the sandwiches.
The sandy sandwich has been a staple of music hall comedians since the advent of the bathing machine, but the feeling of grit between the molars is the least of the textural atrocities in a picnic sarnie. Where a French or Italian peasant will whip out a loaf, filling and a pocketknife and create something perfectly lovely while sat in a hedgerow, the British have always felt the need to make sandwiches hours in advance. An authentic British picnic sandwich is assembled from wet ingredients and processed bread, hermetically sealed in foil or film and incubated until it reduces to a sweaty, homogenous mulch. Even now, the image of a slice of overripe beef tomato embedded in a piece of warm Wonderloaf and topped with a dispiriting sheet of perspiring Cheddar is enough to provoke neurasthenic flashbacks.
You must remember picnic sandwiches, too. They form a sort of collective mental scar that we’ll never really heal. You know what a slice of overripe tomato looks like when it’s been mashed into a slice of packaged white bread. You know how the juices bleach the waxy yellow block Cheddar to the colour of a drowned man’s skin. You know what happens to all of it when it’s wrapped in cling film to incubate and then liberally sprinkled with dirty grey sand. We all know… we were all there.
It is, therefore, no wonder that a normal English person is appalled, even nauseated by the idea of a wet, warm sandwich – how could we not be? Yet across the world there is a family, a class of sandwiches that is designed to be served hot and damp, and all are the better for it. What follows might be difficult to read in places, but we should be brave and dive in.
If you’ve ever asked for a sandwich in France, you’d be forgiven for thinking they had a pretty weak game nationally. Baguette/butter/ham and baguette/butter/cheese are often claimed as part of the faites simple philosophy of food, but can often seem deeply unimaginative and, dare I say it, dull. Sure, if the three ingredients are each exceptional, the results can be pleasing, but almost anyone less hidebound by culinary tradition will be aware that it could be enhanced by a spot of pickle or a handful of crisp lettuce and a splurt of mayo.
No… it would be a justified accusation, that is, until you order a sandwich in Nice or the surrounding areas. For it is there that the French have cast aside all their own rules and created a sandwich of such magnificence that I swear they don’t know what to do with it.
First take a large baguette or boule that you’ve allowed to stale for a day and split it in half. As we’ve seen in other recipes, staling the bread makes it more able to absorb liquids and also makes the cut surface rough and abrasive. Rub, therefore, both cut faces with a peeled clove of garlic, then hose both sides with the most expensive olive oil to which you have access. Open a can of good-quality tuna in olive oil, drain off the oil into a bowl and lay the tuna in big flakes on the oily bread. Add a smear of Dijon mustard, a splash of sherry vinegar and some salt and pepper to the tuna oil to make a rudimentary dressing, then toss in some pitted black olives, sliced red onion, blanched green beans, chunks of tomato and lettuce leaves. Layer everything on top of the tuna, sprinkle on a few capers if you really want to inflame the traditionalists, and perhaps a few anchovies, then pour the remaining dressing over everything. Finally, top with a layer of sliced hard-boiled eggs – the ‘fudgy’ consistency outlined earlier – and close up the loaf.
Now squish down the top until things start to get messy and then wrap the whole thing in several layers of cling film. Arrange the loaf upside down on a plate, weight it down with a heavy pan or some tins and leave in the fridge overnight.
Remove the sandwich from the fridge several hours before you plan to eat it so that it can come up to a suitably Côte d’Azur temperature throughout and the various oils have a chance to become liquid again and further soak everything.
Now, you could argue that for someone in Nice to stick their famous local salad (minus the spuds) in a loaf of bread and squash it doesn’t display the kind of culinary inventiveness we’ve come to expect from French cooks, but you’d be wrong, because it’s the blending – the interplay, if you will – of the elements that makes this sandwich greater than the sum of its parts.
The messiest sandwich known to science is the meatball marinara, which has only lost a little of its popularity since beards became fashionable in parts of New York. There is something about getting garlicky, oily tomato sauce in your facial hair that’s difficult to live with – and particularly difficult to share with your beloved.
The marinara is a ‘sub’, sold as a takeaway snack from small restaurants that might, at other times of the day, offer the same meatballs over a bowl of spaghetti. The restaurateur will love them because they’re cheap and easy to keep hot on the counter for a whole day’s service or longer. The customer loves them because… well, you be the judge.
Mix together some beef mince with fennel-flavoured salsiccia, skins removed, in roughly equal quantities. Add a healthy handful of stale Italian breadcrumbs, a dollop of crème fraîche and a beaten egg. Season immoderately with salt, black pepper, grated fresh garlic, garlic powder, fennel seeds and a little dried oregano. Form the mixture into balls the size of large eggs.
Now make a very simple tomato sauce. Start with a couple of tins of decent tomatoes and three or four peeled cloves of garlic. Place it all in a shallow oven dish and roast, uncovered, on a high setting until the top starts to scorch. Then liquidise the sauce with an immersion blender and season with salt, pepper and lots of olive oil. Use a little less salt than you feel tastes perfect. Drop in the meatballs, cover the dish and allow it to sit, barely simmering, on top of the stove for as long as you can. The idea is to replicate food sitting on a steam table on a deli counter for a long day’s service, during which time the insides of the meatballs will poach gently while the outside will share its flavours with a slowly reducing sauce.
When you can bear it no longer, half split an undistinguished white roll. Something about half the length of a baguette, firm enough to take a soaking, but soft enough not to put up much resistance to the teeth.
Lift two or three of the meatballs out of the sauce and lay them in the roll. Top with slices of provolone and ladle over a load of sauce. If the cheese doesn’t show sufficient signs of compliance, it can be encouraged to melt by flashing it under a grill.
The finished sandwich should not fit easily into your mouth in any direction. Serve with a spare clean shirt.
Perhaps the wettest sandwich of all came into being in Los Angeles, on a date still hotly disputed by the two restaurants that lay claim to inventing it. Cole’s38 claim to have served the French dip when they opened in 1908, while Philippe’s39 claim to have invented it in 1918.
The French dip is a roast beef sandwich on a ‘French’ baguette-style roll that’s been dipped in the juices from the meat roasting pan. At Philippe’s, the roll is cut and immersed in a tank of beefy liquid before assembly; at Cole’s, the juice comes in a bowl so that the customer can judge precisely how soaked he wants his bread. It’s a simple idea, though both establishments have created competing and ever-changing origin myths about servers accidentally dropping rolls in the gravy jug, off-duty cops or firefighters ordering the dip to soften rolls that had staled during the long day and even a customer with bad teeth who needed his sandwich soaked. All or none of these may have basis in truth, as the idea of dipping bread in gravy is hardly the most outrageous innovation, given that a big chunk of meat in a pan of delicious juices is sitting out on the counter.
The problem with the French dip, as any keen cook will already have spotted, is in the mathematics. A large joint will produce many thin slices of delicious roast beef, but nowhere near enough juices to soak everyone’s baguette.
At this point, a mysterious product from the food wholesaler makes its appearance – canned au jus (French for ‘with juice’, but pronounced by the counterman ‘aw joo’). It’s got about as much to do with the juices from the meat on the counter as Bovril does with your Sunday roast, but ‘au jus’ is poured with abandon anywhere in the US that hot roast beef sandwiches are served.
Without the canned beef essence it can be tough to get the proper French dip experience. Even a properly made and well-reduced beef stock doesn’t quite hit the spot, and anything more heavily worked begins to taste like gravy, which has a whole other set of ramifications for the British sandwich lover.40
If you want to make your own French dip, you’ll need a hot roast beef joint from which to shave the thinnest possible slices, and you’ll need to save any drippings as you slice. To achieve the texture and the almost hyper-beefiness of ‘au jus’, the closest thing will be canned beef consommé, if you can still find such a thing on the shelves of your supermarket or deli. It’s usually stored next to the exotic soups, nestled between tinned lobster bisque and soupe de poisson in sealed jars. It will be heavily undersalted, but that can easily be corrected, and the juices from the joint will round out the flavour. It’s important not to mess with it further, though, or you’ll be dipping your sandwich in a cheffy broth and that would be quite contrary to the spirit of the thing. The dip shouldn’t be thickened, as that would make it cling unattractively to the surface of the bread rather than soaking in quickly, though it would be nice if it had a gelatinous quality from the consommé.
The first time I went to Florence was as an art student in the 1980s. I spent some time as an assistant to a photographer, then spent days wandering the streets with a diminishing stock of Lire and Tri-X film.
Early one morning I found myself in the Mercato Centrale – it’s quite gentrified these days, but back then it was a genuinely scuzzy wholesale food market. Wandering foodies are always attracted to markets for the simple reason that the places the traders eat invariably have the best breakfasts at the lowest prices. I found myself drawn by the gravitational pull of Da Nerbone, a stall with a huge queue. This, it turned out, was for the lampredotto, a local sandwich comprising a soft roll packed with hot sauce and the long, slow-braised third stomach of a cow. Yep – tripe in a bun. It’s a lot better than it sounds. And though I can’t replicate the student hunger that made it taste so sublime, I’ve been back in the last couple of years and the same family are still serving it. The queue hasn’t diminished one bit.
You queue to buy a ticket with a mix of locals, tourists and stallholders. At the counter you try to communicate, in front of an increasingly hostile crowd, that yes, you do want the tripe and yes, you know what it is and no, you wouldn’t prefer the beef. If all else fails, resort to gesture and grunt. Ticket obtained, you now join an even longer queue to reach the Lampredotto Guy.
The Lampredotto Guy has clearly been doing it all his life, except, according to the slogan on his hat, when he is at the Firenze boxing club. He is very, very good with the tripe, though, judging by his nose, not so good at the boxing. Taking up a huge knife, he slashes open a semi-crusty bread roll, then uses the tip to fish around in the tank visible to his left for a flubbery slab of greige tripe and slap it onto a board. He stares at you from under the mass of scar tissue that forms his brow in silent challenge: ‘Have you any idea what this is, fool?’
He minces the tripe with one hand while dipping the bottom of the bap into the fluids in the tank, then assembles everything while gesticulating with the knife. It is a relief to realise that he’s actually asking you to choose between a lurid green and a lurid red sauce, either of which may well contain enough capsaicin to subdue a prison riot.
He applies your sauce, wraps the bun in greaseproof paper and thrusts it at you, dropping the shoulder, taking the weight on the back leg and driving through in a tight upward swing.
It is stunningly good. Rich, long-cooked fatty connective tissue. It looks and tastes like the kind of stuff that people get all disgusted about if you don’t remove it from a stew, and so have to eat it quietly afterwards in the kitchen. It’s a treat not to have to hide while eating it.
We could try, if you like, to work out a recipe between us, though how we could replicate the soft, unsalted roll from the bakery next door, I’m not sure. With a bathtub and a fire hose, we could work our way through the long scrubbing of the stomach, which, to my admittedly warped judgement, seems to be about the size of a modest single duvet cover made of wet rubber and smelling aggressively of the byre. I suppose we could rig up some sort of heated bucket and cook it for a day or two, if we were ready to stay up late watching it simmer like a primordial tar pit, honking like a midden. Maybe we could fake the sauces… but there’s no way on God’s Earth we could imitate the sprezzatura of the delivery or the press of honest, hungry tripe enthusiasts in the crowded market. Buy a ticket to Florence. Say the Englishman sent you.
It’s never inappropriate to quote my literary hero MFK Fisher, but this is perhaps one of her least sensually erotic suggestions with food – what was referred to in her family as ‘the railroad sandwich’.
She describes making a sandwich much like the aforementioned, but adds this crucial instruction for an extra phase of ‘cooking’:
Put the two halves firmly together, and wrap them loosely in plastic or foil or wax paper, and then a clean towel. Then, and this is the Secret Ingredient, call upon a serene onlooker (a broad or at least positive beam adds to the quick results, and here I do not refer to a facial grimace but to what in other dialects is called a behind-derriere-bum... etc.), to sit gently but firmly upon this loaf for at least twenty minutes.41
17 Are there any two-and-a-half words in the English language as depressing as these?
18 After writing a sorrowful piece in a newspaper about how the British no longer appreciate their own great corned beef, I was thrilled to receive a message from a reader in Japan who told me that corned beef or konbiifu is avidly consumed there and even sold in the traditional ‘trapezoidal’ tins. Though post-war konibiifu was apparently made with horse meat, there is now a much coveted and luxurious Wagyu version.
19 I always think of this as a ‘carpetbagger’ Monte Cristo. Carpetbagger is a way of serving steak that is popular in Australia and the US (though, weirdly, claimed by the village of Mumbles in South Wales as its own) in which a pocket is cut in a steak, stuffed with oysters and pinned closed before grilling.
20 You can use skimmed or semi-skimmed if you wish…
21 …ha ha! ONLY KIDDING!!!
22 Remember that little smear of butter we left inside the sandwich? It will melt and help the fats in the ham to run.
23 By 1999 it had been licensed to large bakeries in eleven countries. Soon afterwards it seems to have made a bid for freedom and now most bakeries produce at least one form of ciabatta.
24 In 1984 the first Pret A Manger opened in Hampstead, London. The company went into liquidation after trading for eighteen months, whereupon the brand and visual assets were bought by Julian Metcalfe and Sinclair Beecham. The rest, as they say, is history.
25 Figures from the British Sandwich & Food to Go Association.
26 Only the grimmest joints, well off the delivery route, will need to offer ‘gas-flushed’ sandwiches, sealed in an inert atmosphere to give them a longer shelf life.
27 Particularly try it as the base for prawn cocktail sauce. The standard ‘Marie Rose’ served in England is still a depressingly sweet ‘ketchunaise’. Proper salad cream is awesome on its own as a seafood dressing or tinted pink with a little tomato purée that’s been cooked in a dry pan to remove its rather nasty acidity. It will transform your life. You may thank me later.
28 The jury is still out on how he made this particular discovery.
29 We now know that the temperature at which a yolk will set to an ideal degree of ‘fudginesss’ is 73.9°C (165°F).
30 A loan word from English meaning ‘convenience store’.
31 Palpably untrue. They would brown and rot in contact with ice.
32 Block tolerance +/- 1.0mm.
33 Meat pieces are processed the same way in industrial butchery. It was standard blocks of frozen ‘beef ’ pieces that turned out to be the eventual cause of the Europe-wide horse meat scandal in 2013.
34 If you’re not already a regular and inquisitive customer of your local Indian food shop, then a) I’m astonished b) we can no longer be friends and c) you can order pav bhaji masala online.
35 Powdered, dried sour mango. By itself it will shrivel your face. Applied to vegetables it is a revelation.
36 There is, of course, the chip butty… but that’s another story.
37 Emperor Meiji outlawed the wearing of the topknot and the carrying of swords – the two symbols of the Samurai. In doing so he forced a generation of skilled sword makers to turn their skills to culinary knives, creating the tradition of superb Japanese blades. Someone should write a book about this stuff.
38 Cole’s Pacific Electric Buffet. 118 East 6th Street, Los Angeles.
39 Philippe the Original. 1001 N Alameda Street, Los Angeles.
40 I refer, of course, to that triumph of north-eastern culinary arts, the stottie. This is a specially made bread, halfway between a small loaf and a very large roll, soft in texture but with a substantial and strong crust, the better to hold its shape when packed with sliced roast beef and drenched in gravy. The beef stottie is proof – should it be required – that God is a Geordie; but it is not a French dip.
41 From With Bold Knife and Fork (1968), a collection of pieces Fisher wrote for The New Yorker.