We are elevating the humble sandwich to new heights

There was a time when a sandwich was a simple affair….a slice of ham between two pieces of buttered bread – and the height of sophistication was to cut them diagonally instead of just folding them over. Indeed you might argue that ham turned an ordinary sandwich into a posh snack – most of the time, bread and jam was more the order of the day than Denny’s.

But now a sandwich is a work of art – you can win awards and national acclaim for putting things with clashing or complimentary tastes between slices of bread, pieces of toast, or embedded into a big roll.

We’ve lionised the sandwich with hit songs about the joys of the heart disease-inducing breakfast roll – an entire meal, including soft fried egg, in a bap.

We even adopted other nation’s notions of sandwiches…like the kebab, a meal specifically designed to get more grease and sauce on your shirt and trousers than you could ever possibly get down your throat.

The only impediment to the contents of your ideal sandwich is your own imagination – that, and the powers of your digestive system.

So when did the humble sandwich become an object d’art?

The first time we noticed that there could be more to this figarie than mere bread, butter and a piece of meat was when the Yanks came home for their holidays, looking for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches – we’d heard of peanut butter, of course, although we’d never had it.

But how were we to know that what they called jelly, we called jam?

On the other hand, they must have thought we were Neanderthals with our crisp butties or scallion sandwiches.

Perhaps this was the origin of the fusion sandwich – although jam and peanut butter didn’t quite gel on this side of the Atlantic and pastrami on rye was really just something Woody Allen ate in movies around Manhattan.

New York is normally ahead of the posses on most cultural fronts, so it’s no surprise that the city that never sleeps has also come up with some of the more bizarre sandwiches to keep its population wide awake.

Options like baguettes blobbed with sea-urchin roe and smeared with Korean-mustard-oil butter, milk-braised turkey leg on Pullman, or oak-smoked salami squished into an onion roll.

It’s a long way from Tayto or brown banana in your school lunchbox.

There’s a blog called Three Hundred Sandwiches, the work of Stephanie Smith, a thirty-something writer living in Brooklyn who tracks her journey through love with her boyfriend, Eric Schulte – simply known as ‘E’ – in terms of the 300 different sandwiches she will make for him along the way.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.