![]() I didn’t go overboard I didn’t capsize the whole thing on a whim with a spoonful of some rare Neapolitan condiment from my pantry. I put one fat slice of tomato on the bread, salted the tomato, and then paired it with one slice of sharp white cheddar. ![]() I smeared Duke’s mayonnaise on the bread. My moment of enlightenment came on a summer day when I spied some ripe red tomatoes on my kitchen counter. Repeat after me: A simple sandwich is the best sandwich. And there is no improving on a basic BLT.Įventually, like a mystic whose course of study has moved him toward a deeper level of insight, I accepted the truth, and it was the truth of lunch boxes and grandparents and bodegas. There is never a good reason to replace bacon. For instance: What if I make a BLT, but instead of fresh red tomato I’ll use pickled green tomato, and instead of iceberg lettuce I’ll use arugula, and instead of bacon I’ll crisp up some slices of prosciutto. At first, duped by the lure of cheffy innovation, I wasted time and calories trying to “re-create” classics in new ways. A pilgrim’s progress of sandwiches, you might say, in the sense that my day-after-day, wax-on-wax-off focus on sandwich building has taught me things. Like everyone else on earth, I have spent something like 783 months at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, and during that state of suspended animation I have made a lot of sandwiches. I have encountered sandwiches that have filled me up after four bites I have ordered sandwiches that, to put it bluntly, did not fit into my mouth. “Reinvent everything” has been the mantra among restaurant chefs, and while their quest to shake up the core tenets of lunch has led to plenty of intriguing and delicious breakthroughs, from Parm in New York City to Palm City in San Francisco, chefs (being chefs) find it difficult to resist the temptations of excess. We have, in the past decade or so, moved in a different direction from that. Think of a sandwich prized for its thinness, a sandwich made with one slice of meat and one slice of cheese, a sandwich so compact and slim that it can be consumed easily with the use of one hand while the other hand steers a bicycle. The sandwiches you carried along on a family picnic, the sandwiches you wolfed down after school in front of the TV-they were never meant to be examples of extravagance or creative disruption.
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