Upping my sandwich game

"No offence, but I find sandwich recipes pointless. Who needs a recipe for making a sandwich? It’s like looking up a manual before taking a shower, or seeking assistance for changing a lightbulb. Anyone can make a sandwich, no?" Yotam Ottolenghi

This is the nearest I could find to a photograph of the kind of tomato sandwiches I would sometimes find in my school lunchbox. The difference is that the bread would have been white - I didn't like 'brown' bread back then - and there would have been no mayonnaise - just butter. Mayonnaise was not a thing back then in England, we had salad cream which was pretty revolting, and I didn't like that either. In fact I didn't actually like the sandwiches much. I can almost still remember the taste, and I now find it - the created memory of it that is - rather distinctive and satisfying. But back then I really didn't like it - it just didn't taste of fresh tomato.

Today I rarely eat a proper sandwich. Ever since the craze for Scandinavian open sandwiches in the 60s, and bruschetta in late last century I have eaten my sandwiches open. Which is often a precarious thing - particularly if it's an open tomato sandwich or sardines on toast which is a kind of open sandwich. But then open sandwiches are not really sandwiches are they? Well that's what the chat sites like reddit are telling me anyway: "Open faced sandwiches just aren't sandwiches because nothing is being sandwiched." gensix/reddit, which is just one of several similar comments.

Two of my recent newsletters have focussed on sandwiches - Ottolenghi with his The Theory of Everything substack newsletter this week, and Deb Perelman's focus on sandwiches in her last week's Smitten Kitchen newsletter. Well it's spring/summer up there in the Northern Hemisphere, so thoughts turn to picnics and suchlike. However, both of them had some general advice and tempting looking recipes - not that you can access the Ottolenghi ones unless you pay, and so I decided I would try and up my game when it comes to lunch, and perhaps learn a few ways of making better sandwiches. But they had to be quick and easy, involve no cooking, or toasting, and also be adaptable. Ideas rather than recipes really. Which I soon found was actually quite difficult. Most sandwich recipes, ignoring the various 'classic' ones, involve cooking things - pulled pork, cooked for hours, roasted vegetables and so on. Although of course, some of these can be cooked in batches and kept in the fridge for a time to be used when needed, or you can buy roast chicken from the supermarket. The vast majority of sandwiches I saw also involved some toasting so that cheese melted, and so on. And lastly most of these sandwiches were towering multi-storey things. I'm just looking for something simple - a snack. Not dinner and a dinner that's impossible to eat as well.

I did find some basic rules though from Ottolenghi and Nigel - who both seem to frequent what is probably a posh sandwich shop run by a man called Max, whose rules Ottolenghi explains:

"According to Max, perfection in a sandwich is achieved by balancing six key elements: hot, cold, sweet, sour, crunchy and soft. Layering all these correctly will give you the right balance of flavour and texture in every single bite."

However, he actually thought that it was simpler than that:

"there are only two key principles to follow: 1) sandwiches need contrast, and 2) they need to be built with intention." with which Nigel seems to agree: "You take bread – something soft, spreadable and slightly salty – and marry it to something thin, fresh and crisp."

I was particularly taken by Ottolenghi's Egg salad with pistachio dukkah sandwiches, for which his test kitchen colleague:

"Angelos reimagined his grandmother's approach - grating hard-boiled eggs over a bowl until they looked like pale yellow snow. Which provided: this particular texture, silky but not uniform, each bite slightly different from the last."

From looking at the picture I'm guessing there is mayonnaise on the base, topped with an egg mixture and on top of that quick pickled onions and dukkah. All of which could be seriously good and which fulfil those Ottolenghi and Nigel rules. Maybe the recipe will be in his next book.

So I continued my search for the plain and simple and found fancy in a different, more old-fashioned way: Smoked salmon and dill tea sandwiches - Sydney Oland/Serious Eats; Chicken pesto and rocket sandwich - BBC; Little crab sandwiches - Valli Little/delicious.; Egg, tomato and anchovy sandwich - Clotilde Dusuliers/The Guardian; Chicken S&Dwich - James Ramsden and Jacqueline Barbosa/The Guardian and California veggie sandwich - The Amateur Gourmet

I am aware that several, if not all would require me to have to hand various things that I do not generally have - mayonnaise being the first one, but maybe I should start either making some every now and then, or else, work out which brand is a good one to buy. Pesto is another - but that also I do in fact make every now and then, and could be replaced by other green sauces. Cooked chicken is an occasional leftover. and after all, the idea really is to make use of what you have.

Deb Perelman also tended to use things that would be a bother to make at the time, but which are a doddle to have in the fridge on standby - hummus for her Hummus, cucumber and pickled carrots sandwich and her Pickled vegetable sandwich slaw which would indeed be a useful thing to have around - for the sharp and crunchy element.

Bread might also be a problem. Many online sandwich makers recommended focaccia which I don't generally have, but do sometimes. Or baguettes - which we do have. David's wonderful sourdough is always an option though

I did check out Jamie Oliver who is into sandwiches too, but most of his were fairly elaborate and involved a fair degree of cooking. Nigel is generally considered to be a bit of a sandwich king with a philosophy of: "Just because it's one of the most basic forms of sustenance doesn't mean we can't play a little." And play he does, but mostly, like Jamie, there is cooking involved even if it's just bacon for a bacon sandwich - perhaps his favourite:

"it must be ‘slightly too large to eat in polite company’, ‘never elegant’, and ‘not cut into triangles’. And don’t worry about its unhealthiness: ‘A bacon sandwich improved my health enormously … by which I mean my mental health."

Such an unpretentious British thing.

I couldn't resist this slightly more refined Ham and greens sandwich however, even though it's not really what I was looking for - but it's not a lot of cooking and it did look good. I guess it perfectly illustrates his feeling about sandwiches.

"I have never understood why a sandwich can't be a thing of beauty if we want it to be: the right bread for the filling; the introduction of imagination or whim; the decision to toast or not." Nigel Slater

More resolutions which probably won't be kept. But perhaps I should get in a stock of more suitable bread or rolls and put it in the freezer - after all one reddit commenter did say that the simple answer was to just 'change up your bread.'

YEARS GONE BY

June 2

2024 - Hot wing rambles

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Nothing

2021 - First day of winter - sun and lockdown

2020 - Deleted

2019 - What makes gin, gin?

2018 - Yesterday's challenge - Tuscany

2017 - Nothing - still in France