News filters through to us at The Feed’s damp but surprisingly homey underground bunker that the Great New Zealand Toastie Takeover is back for another year. Alas, this annual, pickle-slinger-sponsored celebration of the humble sandwich always fills this writer with a feeling of anxious ambivalence.
It’s not that I don’t believe that sandwiches of all kinds should be treated with reverence. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a bit of friendly nationwide competition. I even think McClure’s pickles are pretty good. My problem is that this competition tends to encourage the kind of gentrifying maximalisization of the humble sandwich which I, as a ‘small c’ conservative of the sandwich world, find distasteful.
Please do not pimp my sandwich. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t deconstruct my lunch. Get way with your gourmet. Keep my sandwich simple, stupid.
I really don’t wish to shame anybody but some ingredients from this year’s entries include: Confit leek. Pickle foam. Gochujang hollandaise. Kumara rosti. Bolagnaise. Lobster and prawn bisque. Mussel and pickle gel. Miso buerre blanc. Everyone needs to take a deep breathe and calm down.
So, what makes a great sandwich?
Bread.
A sandwich must have bread. The bread does not have to be great. It doesn’t even need to be good. But it must fit the sandwich. It must be internally consistent. Take the American hotdog. The hotdog bun on its own is garbage bread. It has zero nutrients and tastes of sugar and little else. But add a steamed frankfurter and some mustard and you suddenly have something weirdly beautiful. It is entirely itself. An expression of its own peculiar people and their culture.
A sandwich should be simple.
There are exceptions and I’ll get to some of them later, but as a rule of thumb, the simpler the better. Look at the Long Island bacon, egg, and cheese, the Parisian jambon buerre, the South Island cheese roll. All stone cold classics. All breathtakingly simple, seasoned only with the tears of their detractors.
A sandwich should be cheap
Get away with your truffles and your caviar, your lobster and your wagyu. A sandwich is the food of the working man and woman and to make it unaffordable is to insult the very essense of the sandwich itself. The soul of the sandwich is the bits of the animal that the rich don’t want. Think the tripe of the Lampredotto from Florence, Palermo’s spleen roll, the beef tongue sandwiches of Persia, Provencal, and New York. (Okay so the New York one isn’t cheap but you pay a premium for the proximity to romcom greatness.)
A sandwich should belong somewhere
Look at the examples I’ve given above. They almost all come with a place attached to them. Sandwiches tend to come from cities and their form and function reflect the particular urban milieu from which they emerged. City folk are busy. They need a lunch they can eat with one hand, leaving the other free to access Google Maps, fend off the attentions of a ne’er-do-well street urchin, hail a taxi, or gesture rudely at other city dwellers. The best sandwiches are born from a culture. Which is another problem of Toastie Takeover: it’s asking a bunch of individual chefs to create something which is, at its best, the fruit of a community’s collective desire. It is asking a human to perform the magic of something that is more than human.
The world’s five best sandwiches (this list changes daily if not hourly on a day I skip breakfast)
5) Banh Mi
What delicious sorcery could produce such a wonder? The French colonisation of Vietnam in the 19th century caused a collision of two great food cultures and, in the 1950s, the Banh Mi as we know it emerged from Saigon and became one of the world’s greatest sandwiches. Served in a baguette with a thin, crisp crust and a light airy texture, moistened with a rich pate then stuffed full of sharp, tangy, textural ingredients like vietnamese sausage, barbeque pork, coriander, pickled carrot and daikon, fish sauce, and red chilli. Banh Mi is slowly taking over the world and I’m okay with that.
4) The Reuben
A dark brooding beast of a sandwich, the creation of the American jewish diaspora, a sandwich served in kosher delis across the US despite the fact it isn’t kosher (it combines cheese and meat), and the grilled cheese by which all others shall be judged. A combination of corned beef (or pastrami), Swiss cheese, sauerkraut, and Russian dressing, served on rye bread. There is some evidence the Reuben was born in Omaha, Nebraska but it’s true home is New York City.
3) Panino col polpo
On several occasions when I have been in Southern Italy, people have come up to me and, apropos of nothing, begun speaking to me in the Bari dialect. Because I am swarthy of complexion, short of stature, and barrel-like of build, I am often taken for a denizen of that great Puglian city. I am not. I’m from Cambridge, New Zealand and I like sandwiches way too much. But this great Bari lunch is something I would be proud to be assosiated with even erroneously. A crusty bread roll stuffed with smokey, grilled octopus, seasoned with olive oil, parsley, and salt and pepper. A thing of majestic simplicity.
2) Nashville hot chicken sandwich
My friend Jen bought me one of these in Nashville airport whilst I was suffering from an earth-shattering, late 40s hangover. It simultaneously saved and changed my life. Crispy marinated fried chicken drowned in a cayenne pepper-based hot sauce, off-set by crunchy pickles, dressing and coleslaw. Served in a simple, toasted white bun. Best thing to come out of Nashville since Willie Nelson moved to Austin.
1) The taco
Yes, the taco is a sandwich. Yes it is the best one. No I will not be more specific. Go ahead and @ me.
