THE INFAMOUS SANDWICH

          You know, one of the things people sometimes ask me is, ‘Geoff, is a taco a sandwich?’

And, because I’m that kind of guy, I’m often able to direct them to legal precedent.  There’s a lot of debate about this kind of thing in America, usually in food courts that have some restriction on what kind of restaurant can open there. I’ve been following it for years.

 In the most recent case I know of - Quintana v. Fort Wayne Plan Commission – the developer Martin Quintana wanted to open a Mexican restaurant - Famous Tacos - on his property, but years earlier he’d agreed with the commission and a local homeowners’ association that he couldn’t open a ‘proper’ restaurant there, but he could open ‘A sandwich bar-style restaurant whose primary business is to sell “made-to-order” or “subway-style” sandwiches (which by way of example includes, but is not limited to, “Subway” or “Jimmy John’s”, but expressly excludes traditional fast food restaurants such as “McDonalds”, “Arbys” and “Wendys”).’

In 2022 Quintana tried to get the zoning restriction amended, and it went back and forth through the courts until May of this year when it was agreed that ‘The proposed Famous Taco restaurant falls within the scope of the general use approved in the original Written Commitment. The proposed Famous Taco restaurant would serve made-to-order tacos, burritos, and other Mexican-style food.’

         The court agreed with Quintana that tacos and burritos are Mexican-style sandwiches, and the original zoning law didn’t specify that the sandwiches had to be American-style.  ‘The original Written Commitment would also permit a restaurant that serves made-to-order Greek gyros, Indian naan wraps, or Vietnamese banh mi.’  So everybody wins, I think.

 

This was on my mind a couple of days ago when I ate something designated a ‘French taco,’ a thing I’d never heard of before, at Moozak’s French Tacos, in a small food court called Medz Corner, in London’s Kensington High St.

 

If I may quote the website: ‘Step into the world of French tacos, where two delicious cultures come together in a mouthwatering fusion. These "tacos lyonnais" are a blend of Mexican and French flavors that anyone can enjoy.’

 

I had the Lamb Special which is described like this on the menu:  ‘Saucy Minced Lamb, Crispy Chicken, Fries, Mozzarella Cheese, Signature Cheese Sauce.’

 

Yep the French fries are inside the taco, smothered in two kinds of cheese.  I’m prepared to believe there was chicken in there too, though I didn’t detect any crispiness.

 

It was a hell of a meal, and personally I’m not sure I’d have considered it either a sandwich or a taco – I’d probably have said it was a wrap.  It tasted pretty good, and there was enough food to serve at least two and a half people. So yes, I was overwhelmed, but in a more or less good way. 

SANDWICH MEN (AND WOMEN)

I used to say, and it’s become an ever less impressive boast as the years have gone by, that I thought I’d read every word Jack Kerouac ever published. Unfortunately, at a certain point, if your reading career has been as long as mine has, you start to forget as much as you remember.  

 

Even so, picking up Jack’s Book: an oral biography of Jack Kerouacby Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, I was surprised to see an interview with Carolyn Cassady, wife of Neal Cassady and lover of Kerouac, who appears in On the Road as"Camille,"and she was talking about sandwiches.

 

Kerouac and his girlfriend Luanne Henderson (Marylou in the novel) were in San Francisco and things weren’t going well between them, and Carolyn Cassady writes, “So then he went off on the bus with his fifteen sandwiches.”

Now, I’ve always been interested in literary depictions of food – “Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls” and all that kind of thing, but I had no memory of Jack Kerouac and his sandwiches. 

 

And so I returned to On The Road and sure enough there are sandwiches galore.  This is in Part Two, Chapter 12,  “What I accomplished by coming to San Francisco I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave; Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again; they were all going to go rotten on me by the time I got to Dakota … 

“At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.” 

It does seem that Carolyn Cassidy miscounted the number of sandwiches.

 

And this is earlier, Part One, Chapter 13, when the fictionalized Kerouac is in Los Angeles, “With the bus leaving at ten, I had four hours to dig Hollywood alone. First I bought a loaf of bread and salami and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country on. I had a dollar left. I sat on the low cement wall in back of a Hollywood parking lot and made the sandwiches. As I labored at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that humming West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city. And this was my Hollywood career-this was my last night in Hollywood, and I was spreading mustard on my lap in back of a parking-lot John.”

         I’m not sure I ever saw a public toilet in a parking lot in Los Angeles, but if I had I don’t think I’d have wanted to make sandwiches there.

 

There are various other mentions of sandwiches in On the Road, including hot roast beef sandwiches eaten in a diner in Denver, and also of course mentions of other food too, most of it all-American – hamburgers, cherry pie with ice cream, blue fish, popcorn - but it’s the sandwiches that stay with me now.

I’ve tried to find a picture of Kerouac with a sandwich, and I’ve failed, but there’s no shortage of pictures of him drinking. 

 

 

 

SOME THINGS I PUT IN MY MOUTH - 2023 EDITION

AWAY FROM HOME:

 

A Negroni at Iberica, Victoria.

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A sausage roll at Delice, Lloyd Park – beef sausage for some (in fact I suppose fairly obvious) reason. 

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A pasty on an appealing plate, at the caff at the East Ruston Old Vicarage Garden.

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Toasted sandwiches served on slate at the Copr Bar, Swansea, though I actually forget what was in them:

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Zestily presented sausage bap and chips at the Sun, Dedham:

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It’s a wrap at the Welcome Institute.

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Anchovies, at the Orford Saloon in Walthamstow.

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Crispy squid, chips and salad, at the Rising Sun, Twickenham, eaten in the unexpected company of pre-game rugby fans who were consuming vast quantities of pizza.

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Seared Ahi tuna with ‘resort grown avocado pickled shallots, shaved Fresno pepper, gochujang bbq drizzle,’ at Edna’s Eaterie, Tucson Botanic Gardens. No, I’d never heard of gochujang either but it’s a kind of chili paste apparently.

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Spoiled for choice at the caff at the Horniman Museum.

Photo by Caroline Gannon, as are quite a lot of the others.

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AND AT HOME

In fact it’s a venison fillet but I know it looks like a sausage:

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Cheese straws, made by following (not very closely) a recipe for ‘Dishoon’s cheese and masala sticks’ 

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Devilled kidneys – my butcher is a good butcher but you have to ask him to order in kidneys specially:

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Another steak tartare in a universe of steak tartares:

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Taco night – not so much deconstructed as self-destructed:

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White Lake Cheese Somerset Dairy Tor, from Teddington Cheese in Richmond.

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Comparatively sophisticated - smoked mackerel. asparagus, Hollandaise sauce:

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Cheese on toast and beans (less sophisticated)

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A haggis pie with what looks like a fox’s face, though it was supposed to be a heart:

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Shepherd’s pie, post-Xmas – made with leftover duck (I read that Giles Coren was having the same.)

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BY THE BOOK

I can’t remember exactly when I first made an attempt to read Ulysses; but it was somewhere between starting to drink illegally in pubs and being able to drink legally in pubs.  And I was fascinated by the Lestryogonians section where Bloom eats a gorgonzola sandwich accompanied by a glass of Burgundy.

‘Mr. Bloom ate his stripes of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese. Sips of his wine soothed his palate.  Not logwood that.  Tastes fuller this weather with the chill off’ 

I wasn’t sure about the mustard with gorgonzola, or with cheese in general, but I know some people like that that kind of thing.

That passage in Ulysses cheered me up no end. I was already a bookish lad, and I thought. ‘This is great. This is what my life could be about: reading books and thinking about food.’  

At much the same time as I tackled Ulysses, I started to read Samuel Beckett’s novels, though somehow I missed, or at least had forgotten till I reread it a couple of weeks back, this passage in Murphy (1938).

‘She (Celia) entered the saloon bar of a Chef and Brewer and had a sandwich of prawn and tomato and a dock glass of white port off the zinc.’

I’ve had white port once or twice, though not off the zinc, and I know it wasn’t Borges brand, though for literary reasons I wish it had been.

It’s hard to think of white port without thinking of the song ‘White Port and Lemon Juice,’ or ‘WPLJ” originally by the 4 Deuces, then given some fame by Frank Zappa.

I don’t know if the Four Deuces ate a sandwich with their white port and lemon juice; I suspect not.

Then just the other day I was thumbing through a reprint of The Artistry of Mixing Drinks by Frank Meir of the Ritz bar in Paris (1934), and remembered it contained a poem by J. Ainsworth Th. Morgan titled ‘Ode to the Ritz Bar’ which contains these lines

‘The noise of liquor, ice and shake;

A kingly mixing knack,

A sandwich, almond or a chip, 

Then ‘bottoms-up” and “Smack.”! 

Of course we don’t know what cocktail our poet was thinking of, and we know there are such things as ‘cocktail sandwiches’ but it seems to me there aren’t many cocktails that go very well with a sandwich, and vice versa.

MARMITE NIGHTS

Comfort reading is probably better for you than comfort eating, though sometimes they overlap.

I read a little more PG Wodehouse, specifically ‘The Juice of an Orange’ which is about an essentially benign Hollywood screenwriter, Wilmot Mulliner, who’s put on all-orange-juice diet by his doctor, and he becomes a good deal less benign as a result.  Hunger makes him mean and angry.  

He goes to a story conference at which his boss Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer

has a pile of sandwiches on his desk (at least some of them beef), ‘A scenario-writer, informed of the facts of the case, would undoubtedly have thought of those sandwiches as Sandwiches of Fate.’

 Schnellenhamer ‘was not one of those men who can eat sandwiches aloofly and, as it were, surreptitiously.  When he ate a sandwich there was no concealment or evasion ... There was a brio, a gusto about his performance which stripped it of all disguise.  His sandwich flew before him like a banner.’

The famished Mulliner can’t stand it. He blows his top.  ‘Stop it! I say,’ thundered Wilmot, ‘stop eating those sandwiches immediately.’  And he’s immediately fired, but one way or another his meanness and anger is appreciated and respected and he becomes the business manager of Hortensia Burwash  who’s also been on a similar diet.

Which brings me to Helen Mirren as so many things do.  I’ve belatedly started following her on Instagram and she posted the above picture with the caption, ‘Maybe my most favorite super.  Any guesses?’  The image got over 23,000 likes and over 1,500 comments many of which are frankly absurd, suggesting she’s eating jelly, fig jam or Branston pickle with her cheese. A few do cheese and Marmite, which is what it looks like to me, and  sounds fair enough for an Essex girl like Helen.

I also found the above pic of Ms. Mirren drinking in a place called Pal’s Lounge her stepson’s bar in New Orleans.  The cocktail is called, a Helen F***ing Mirren.  Foaming perhaps.  Apparently it contains ‘Belle Isle honey habanero Moonshine habanero, house-made Crescent Vodka Earl Grey tincture with a Belle Isle honey habanero Moonshine lollipop floating on top.’  There are many things I don’t want on top of an alcoholic drink the lollipop is very definitely one of them.  

I also used to think Marmite was another, but most Marmite cocktails just have Marmite around the rim of the glass which is actually not much different from salt around the rim of a Margarita.

YET MORE SANDWICH LORE

I was thinking about Enid Blyton, the way you do.  When I was a kid I really used to enjoy her books even though they depicted a world that was very strange to me.  That may have had a lot to do with the English class system.  And now I wonder if it was the strangeness that I actually enjoyed.

I do remember the characters were always having picnics – our family never had picnics. This illustration by Eileen Soper seems to say it all:

Today, of course, I do wonder what was actually in those sandwiches.

And then this picture popped up on Facebook, posted by Howard Rodman.  It’s by Berenice Abbott, and shows McSorley's Ale House, on East 7th Street, in Manhattan. 

The thing that really caught my eye was that sign on the wall offering sandwiches for ten cents and fifteen cents, with no mention of what was in them.

         McSorley’s is still there and I did go there once in the 1990s, I remember that across the street there was an empty lot with rats running all over it, and there was a white DeTamaso Pantera parked in front of it. The latter was far more suprising than the former.

And I managed to find this more or less contemporary photograph of McSorley’s. The sandwiches have gone up in price but at least they tell you what’s in them.

AND THERE'S THIS:

https://nicholsonland.blogspot.com/2018/05/some-sandwiches.html

THE (NOT ESPECIALLY) SECRET LIFE OF THE SANDWICH – ONE OF A SERIES

An English sandwich in England, though actually it's a kind of Spanish ham sandwich at Enrique Tomas, a “jamoneria” in Soho:

Another English sandwich in England, though actually it’s kind of an open-face Danish beef sandwich, at Ole and Steen, in Tottenham Court Road:

And now back in LA, and an all-American (and organic) tuna salad sandwich at the Mustard Seed in Los Feliz:

The quest continues.