Of the club sandwich on white toast with mayonnaise I
sing, O muse - and why can't the general public get a good one in New York City?
Is it the "club"? Do you have to work at one in order to understand what's
wanted?
It would seem so. For six days in a row last week, I
had a delicious club sandwich for lunch. The Buccaneer Beach Hotel, across the
harbor from Christiansted, USVI, may be neither snooty nor stuffy, but it is
very much the same sort of resort to which my parents liked to repair fifty
years ago, and notwithstanding myriad advances on the modcons front - not to
mention seismic shifts in the dress code - the ancient secrets of the club
sandwich have been preserved. It was only on the day of departure that I didn't
consume every last morsel - we had but ten minutes in which to eat before
hopping into a taxi to the airport. Confronting, day after day, the concrete
realization of a Platonic ideal inevitably provoked reflections upon the theory
and practice of the club sandwich. In the hope that you, dear reader, will
migrate to Manhattan and pursue a culinary career in one of the coffee shops
across the street, I will share my thoughts.
The club sandwich is a tricky confection of bacon,
turkey, lettuce and tomato. lubricated by mayonnaise, mounted on three, not two,
slices of toasted bread, and cut into diagonal quarters secured by toothpicks.
If we begin by contemplating its raucous backstairs sibling, the BLT, we see at
once how important it is that the turkey in a club sandwich be moist and sliced
very thin. For the turkey is not just "more meat." As a counterfoil to the
bacon's crunchiness, it must be rosily tender. The first bite of a good club
sandwich makes it clear that turkey is taking the place of ham, theoretically
mouthwatering but factually, in view of the bacon, de trop. In other
words, the turkey in a club sandwich is ham that comes from a different animal.
The slices are paper-thin so as not to detract from the crunch of the bacon and
the toast.
Most living things are largely water, but tomatoes are
so watery that they make the rest of us look like clay. To participate in any
kind of sandwich, tomato slices must dry out a bit, lest they subvert the
construction like liquid icebergs. Spending a few salted minutes on paper towels
is essential. And, speaking of icebergs, let's be clear about the lettuce: only
iceberg will do. Romaine, which is equally crunchy, may be ideal for Caesar
salads, but it's far too bitter for what is essentially the sweetest of savory
concoctions.
Even the bacon is not a no-brainer. If it is
undercooked, teeth won't cut it; overcooked and brittle, it is almost as
destructive as soggy tomato. The bacon must be moist (okay, greasy) enough to
adhere to its neighbor, which is neither the lettuce nor the turkey, both of
which lie on the other side of the middle piece of toast.
The mayonnaise must be Hellmann's. I made a club
sandwich once with some leftover mayonnaise that I'd whipped up the day before
for something else, and the problem was that the mayonnaise tasted really good.
The mayonnaise in a club sandwich shouldn't taste at all. Its strictly
supporting role is to provide a creamy solvent to an ensemble of ingredients
that are either very dry (bacon, turkey, toast) or very not (lettuce, tomato).
Finally, everything must be thin. The bite of a club
sandwich ought to be melting, not a tug of war. It ought to be very easy to eat,
not a production that requires you to open wide and say "AHHH."
At the Buccaneer, as at a few other seaside resorts
that I've been to, the club sandwich is a compound, not a mixture. It does not
taste like bacon-turkey-lettuce-tomato-mayonnaise-toast. It tastes like a club
sandwich, miraculously smooth and chewy at the same time. It is well worth the
hell of two plane flights.
