With all due respect to my wife, the longest-lasting and most rewarding relationship in my life is with sandwiches. (An idle daydream while writing this piece that had me make a Sophie’s Choice-style decision between my two loves left me dispirited for the next half hour.) Our torrid love affair began the first time a humble peanut butter and jelly variation on processed white bread passed between my lips and has been growing ever since. I marvel how a sandwich can be fierce and biting in a cubano one moment and be playful and bright in a caprese the next. I have never seen a day that wouldn’t be made better with a sandwich; even when the modern day haters show their blatant gluten-phobia I stand by my man(wich).
Before we get to far in, let us briefly define our terms: a sandwich is any dish wherein one or more pieces of bread serve as a container or wrapper for some other food. This definition purposefully includes tacos (tortillas being nothing more than unleavened flat bread), gyros, hot dogs, burgers, and even burritos, while removing sad lettuce wraps and the depressing mélange of paleo bread alternatives that have sprouted up recently. Here’s the thing, people who want to argue about tacos and hot dogs not being sandwiches: shut up. The same people who are arguing that a hot dog is not a sandwich are the ones who were wandering around at New Year’s parties in 1999 telling anyone who would listen that the new century didn’t start until 2001. You might be right, asshole, but we were all having a lot more fun before you got here.
Sandwiches are a big tent, uniting humanity under a coalescing concept: there is a simple moment, usually but not limited to somewhere in the middle of your day, where a good combination of bread and filling will make up for any indignities you had to suffer during the first half of your day and bolster your will for its remainder.
The golden standard of bread/filling/bread in my humble (and absolutely, totally, one-hundred-percent correct) opinion comes from an Italian-deli style submarine sandwich chain shop based out of western New York called Dibella’s.
While they offer a large swath of sandwiches, I am devoted to a single one. In fact, since determining my ideal combination of fillings and meats in 1999, I have literally never purchased a different sandwich from them. It has a relatively long ingredient list, by sandwich standards: An irregular oval of sesame white bread roll, cut approximately 85% across lengthwise, leaving a hearty wall to connect the upper and lower pieces of bread. The bread is the most important element, and the place that most sandwich shops fall down hardest. A good roll requires a militaristic commitment to baking fresh, multiple times a day buns. The crust has a crunch that yields quickly to the soft underbelly of the interior roll, which in its own way provides texture and then steps aside to make way for the interior filling’s flavor. As a small aside, you should be able to hold one end of a good roll without the other side flopping flaccidly downward (looking at you, Subway.) Mayo is spread generously across both the top and bottom of the bread – spreading rather than squirting from a bottle ensures no overly-gloppy zones of leftover goop. Next come the vegetables; Lettuce and white onion, never anything other than fiercely crisp and fresh, pickled red and green hot peppers, there only to bring spice to the sandwich with no overly cloying sweet or peppery flavor. Seasoned oil, added at this moment to lightly marinate the vegetables. Roast beef and turkey are generously laid on one side of the bun, obscuring the whole bottom of the bread in two separate layers. Finally, a layer of tessellated provolone, acting as the high-friction stopper that prevents the mayo-covered top bun from sliding off the sandwich and providing a calm creaminess to add depth to the texture and flavor of each bite.
I myself have been purveyor of delectable sandwiches of the fried chicken variety for the past year. After a brief dalliance with fried chicken pieces early on in our operation, our menu now is limited to just three sandwiches and a few sides. This decision is a bold calculation in its implicit message to potential customers: you may want something different than what we offer, but you can not deny our singular focus on the dish at hand. The gamble has paid off; without linking to too many blog posts or yelp reviews, we are generally thought of as one of the best fried chicken sandwiches in the city, being reviewed favorably to New York culinary giants Danny Meyer and David Chang’s variations. I am proud that we have become firmly entrenched in the New York City midtown lunch firmament, that we have been well received, that ours is among the leaders in the battle against the mid-day blahs.
And yet I still ponder daily the exact chemistry and sorcery of protein to condiment to bread to provide an ideal bite. Is there a bun that would better support my chicken? Do three pickles provide enough acidity, and how best can I spread them to ensure equal brine in each bite? Should we be putting the mayo on the top bun? I ponder a single dish with five total ingredients every day and still don’t feel that I put enough thought into this humble beast. And even when a sandwich has been firmly figured, there is a new chef to train to drizzle the chicken with hot sauce just so, a new season of cucumbers to learn the sweetness of, a new special to dream about, and so on.
This speaks to the grand truth of why sandwiches stand alone among a wide sea of other ubiquitous food items – sandwich glory is neither a singular path nor a zero-sum game; your sandwich and my sandwich can be equally as delicious as each other without diminishing either. Beyond just understanding that two fried chicken sandwiches can be both wildly different from each other and still both be delicious, this also moves to a larger point: the fact that basically every culture in human history has its own variation of bread/meat/bread is a singular way to understand humanity as a kindred force, united in a quest for sustenance; spokes on a bike wheel all ending in the same place.
Call it the Nobel Peace Prize theory of sandwiches: appreciation for the way someone else prepares a sandwich can help you learn to appreciate their soul. The man who sells the superlative schwarma in a pita sandwich in my neighborhood believes that Israel shouldn’t exist; I disagree. We could argue for hours, or we could nod contentedly as we both devour shaved meat on bread as the world goes by. We may not resolve any major issues, but the next time I reduce his culture to they or them in casual conversation, I may remind myself that we are all just part of a larger, sandwich loving “they.”
The theory may sound hopelessly optimistic, or terribly naïve – I certainly don’t propose that sandwiches are going to help bring peace to a world that is filled with hate and fear. I’m not saying that a peace process in the Middle East will be solved by a particularly good falafel sandwich; in fact, I’m not saying much at all, because I have a sandwich in my mouth. Wouldn’t the world be better if across the world, instead of mouths filled with hateful and divisive speech, we had mouths filled with sandwiches?