A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches

Yes, Virginia, the cover of this cookbook is actually black & white with bits of blue on the cellophane toothpicks. That should be a hint that this not your average cookbook, though far from being an upsetting one. I think A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches should have been titled the The Super Upending Cookbook About Sandwiches. Tyler Kord really does upend the traditional notion of the sandwich. The venerable old Earl must be turning in his grave.

Tyler Kord has a few sandwich shops in NYC or perhaps "restaurants" since Bon Appétit named one of them as a top ten new restaurant in the country. What you need to know about Tyler Kord is that he is unnaturally in love with broccoli and Van's made a shoe for him. (Yes, you can buy your own pair, if you have the dough.)

As someone who has read thousands of cookbooks, I can tell you that many of those that rise from the back rooms of restaurants are pompous. Yes, chefs do "write" them on occasion, but in an attempt to describe that grand world of restaurant cooking, the voice is often pretentious or really just tool-y. Kord is not pretentious.

He understands that he is making sandwiches.  He will not be making you a BLT.  He might make you a sandwich with curry chicken salad and squid.  He might make you a sandwich with black bean hummus and ceviche.  He might make you sandwich named after a battle. As you read through the book, you will think about sandwiches differently. (Really, roasted cauliflower and a raisin scallion sauce?) You will think about food differently. (Do lychees and broccoli really go together?) You will even think about cookbooks differently. (Who chats with their editor in the middle of a cookbook?)  

Now here is where we put a recipe from the cookbook.  There are so many sandwiches, but... one of our favorite things in the world is a jar of pickled blueberries. Every year I get 10 pound boxes of blueberries from a farm in Maryland. After eating a pound right out of the box, there are jams, jellies, catsup, pies, tarts, shrubs, and finally, several jars of pickled blueberries. So herewith, Kord's recipe.

Pickled Blueberries

1 cup white vinegar, plus some more if needed
1/4 cup sugar
1 3/4 tablespoons kosher salt
1 1/4 pounds blueberries
1 small red onion, halved and thinly sliced

Combine everything in a plastic container with a tight fitting lid.  There should be enough vinegar to completely cover the berries and onions, if not, add a little more. Pretend it is those pickled red onions that you hate so much and shale vigorously.  You want to bruise the berries a little and also get out some aggression you feel toward your roommate. Why would you still have a roommate? Why do you hate pickled red  onions so much? Let sit for at least 2 hours, but preferably longer, shaking occasionally.  They will last in the refrigerator for a long time.

Kord suggests they make a fine replacement for tomatoes on your sandwich.  So make yourself a BLB while reading A Super Upsetting Cookbook About Sandwiches.

The Edgewater Sandwich Book

Everyone knows the story of the sandwich.  Once upon a time...   

The Earl of Sandwich was a big old gambler and could not be persuaded to leave the card table for the dinner table.  He instructed his cook to slap his meat between to slices of bread so he could eat and gamble simultaneously.  Here, necessity was the mother of invention.

Sine then, the sandwich has been a staple in our diet and once we eat anything, of course, someone writes a cookbook about it.  Arnold Shircliffe wrote The Edgewater Sandwich Book in 1930 for the Hotel Monthly Handbook series.  Hotel Monthly did a series of books that were long and narrow, presumably to tuck into a Chef’s vest pocket.  (Though I couldn’t name a chef that has a vest pocket these days.)  Arnold Shircliffe was quite the collector of all things food.  For many years he worked at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago.

The Edgewater Sandwich Book features a dedication to the founder of the sandwich, the famous Earl, whose picture graces the frontispiece of the book.

These little Hotel Monthly books have become quite collectible.  Like so many of these little books, they are filled with recipes that are a bit vague.  Well, perhaps not vague to a chef, they are still just sandwiches.  Really, a ham and cheese open face sandwich is a ham and cheese open face sandwich. If the “recipe” calls for strawberry jam, then just add it.

The little book has hundreds of sandwich recipes and a special chapter for canapés and for compound butters and spreads for sandwiches.

There are ham, roast beef, veal, pig’s feet, rabbit, even squirrel sandwiches which one makes the same way as one would make a rabbit sandwich.  

Rabbit Sandwich

Rabbit, bread, butter, lettuce, bacon

Sauté the leg or loin of rabbit, then smother until tender.  Allow to cool, then cut in thin slices.  Arrange them on thin slices of buttered bread.  Season, press on leaf of lettuce, a strip of grilled bacon and upper slice.  Trim and cut in two diagonally.

Not only are there a plethora of meaty fillings there are also vegetable, nuts and fruit fillings.  Apples are of course, a logical choice for sandwich fillings, but prunes are a new one.

Prune Sandwich-I

Prunes, lemon juice, lettuce, mayonnaise, bread

Mix together six large prunes, chopped, two teaspoons lemon juice and one-third head lettuce, chopped fine.  Spread with butter and mayonnaise on slices of plain bread.  Press on upper slice and cut in desired shapes.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Prune Sandwich-II.  It calls for a whole wheat bread and Oregon prunes which are supposed to be tart.   For the truly bold there is something called the cannibal, an open faced sandwich of beef tartar.

Cannibal Sandwich

Spread thin slices of bread with finely ground or chopped raw beef, without tissues and sinews, mixed with a little finely chopped onion, and seasoned.  This is an open sandwich and the layer of meat should be about the same thickness as the bread.  Sprinkle with chopped chives and criss-cross with fork times to give a decorative appearance.

 Lord knows there is nothing worse than a Cannibal Sandwich that has not been decorated with fork tines.  This is one of those collectible titles that is a charming piece of history, but is probably not for everyone.  Though without this gem, I would have never thought of a pig’s foot sandwich or a cannibal sandwich, either.

Midnight Feasts

Charmain Ponnuthurai gathered a group of fairly famous folks to put together a cookbook with a theme. The theme was midnight eating. The book is a fundraiser for Springboard, a children's dyslexia organization in Britain. Those of you who read this blog (and correct its spelling) know that such a cause is near and dear to my heart, or my brain which is unable or unwilling to differentiate between "d" and "b" and "p."

In the introduction to Midnight Feasts, Ponnuthurai fondly remembers a passage from British children's author, Enid Blyton, who wrote in The Ship of Adventure of children sitting in a dark courtyard eating:

"I've never known bread and cheese to taste so lovely, " said Diana.
"It's goat-milk cheese, isn't it Bill?"
"I say, look at Mickey stuffing himself."

Chefs like Fergus Henderson and Yotam Ottolenghi, royals like the duchess of york and Lady Carole Bamford and actors like Gillian Anderson and Gwyneth Paltrow take us into their late-night cravings and ideal after- dark dinner.

Gillian Anderson's Peanut Butter & A Banana

1 banana
2 tablespoons peanut butter

Take the banana and slice it end to end down the middle. Take some peanut butter, smooth or crunchy, your choice and lather it down the one side of the banana as thick as your tastes desire. Place the other half of the banana on top like a sandwich.
Then slice two, three or four times, depending on the size of your banana, creating little individual peanut butter banana sandwiches. Wrap each section individually in tin foil and place a whole lot of them in a plastic container in the freezer. Then, in the middle of the night, open the freezer, grab a ball of tin foil, unwrap it and find a surprisingly delicious snack just waiting for your enjoyment. It image that most reminds me of this snack is the yellow man that pops up when you send an AOL email message.

If you read this blog, you know I am not making this recipe. I let my love of the X-Files and Bleak House override my hatred of bananas.

1001 Sandwiches

In 1928, Florence Cowles wrote a book entitled 500 Sandwiches. Over the next twenty years, the book was reprinted many times. 500 Sandwiches became 700 Sandwiches and finally 1001 Sandwiches. In fact, there is one edition of this book that was bound with the 500 sandwich recipes but with the 700 sandwich title. In case you are wondering, who counts the recipes in the books, each type of sandwich had a “head count” as it were. So one can add up the sandwich numbers without actually counting the "Tomato Soup Sandwich" or the "Cheese and Pea Sandwich."

Thank god, because I would surly lose count of the pimiento sandwiches alone. Who knew there was so much one could do with pimientos, or peanut butter, or liver. There are the traditional "Ham and Cheese Sandwich" and the not so traditional "Ham and Beet Sandwich", or the "Ham and Banana Sandwich" or the "Deviled Ham and Jam Sandwich."

There are nearly three hundred pages of sandwiches and there is not a single page that won’t leave you with peculiarly queasy look as you read.

Mrs. Cowles suggests that everyone keep a…”variety of sandwich “makings” always on your emergency shelf; or better still, keep a special sandwich shelf for them.” Because is you have a good selection of ingredients, “you can meet calmly and sandwich emergency which may arise.”

Since we are in the Lenten season, here is sandwich for that very occasion.

Lenten Sandwich II

6 hard-cooked eggs
1 cup English walnuts
3 tablespoons chopped sweet pickle
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon prepared mustard
1/2 cup vinegar

Grind together the nuts and egg whites. Ass pickle. Mash the egg yolks and add the seasoning. Mix all together and spread on leaf lettuce between white bread.

Yes, this is the second Lenten sandwich in the book. Remember there are 1001 sandwiches in 1001 Sandwiches, so pretty much every occasion is covered. There is no “sandwich emergency” you can’t tackle as long as your emergency sandwich shelf is stocked.

Panini Express

I got a panini press as a Christmas gift. A sleek and sturdy Breville from Williams- Sonoma, which is truly a thing of beauty.

Here I will confess that a panini is really just a toasted sandwich, so an expensive stainless steel clad sandwich masher is a bit of an extravagance, especially for me. I am not a big “toast” fan. I eat cold hamburger buns.
Crunchy things scratch the roof of my mouth. And yet, there she sits on my kitchen counter, my own panini press.

Naturally, I couldn’t own a panini press without an appropriate cookbook. I chose Daniel Leader and Lauren Chattman’s Panini Express. Leader owns and operates a bakery in the Catskills called Bread Alone. He gives you the required info on purchasing a panini machine, like buy one with a non-stick griddle so you don’t have to clean it with balled up paper towels and Q-tips. But, in the end, he is a pragmatist as I am; a panini is just a toasted sandwich.

So instead of merely focusing on a panini, Leader offers bread recipes, condiment recipes and some darn fine sandwich combos. The vibrant color pictures are a perfect example of gastro-porn. Like women in girly magazines, these sandwich are clearly sandwiches but not sandwiches that you have ever seen.

Here is Bread Alone’s...

Tuna Panini

One 6 1/2 ounce can oil-packed solid white tuna, drained well
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 scallions (white parts only), finely chopped
2 tablespoons capers, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
Four 1/2-inch-thick slices rye bread
8 thin slices (4 ounces) Gruyere or Swiss cheese

Heat a panin or sandwich press according to manufacture’s instructions.
Combine the tuna, mayonnaise, scallions, capers, parsley, and lemon juice in a medium bowl. Mash well with a fork to combine. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
Arrange the tuna on top of two of the bread slices. Top with the cheese. Top with the remaining bread slices. Put the sandwiches on the press, pull the top down, and cook until they are browned and crisp, 3 to 6 minutes, depending on how hot your machine is. Carefully remove from the press and serve immediately.

This book works, even if the only thing sitting on your counter is as old toaster.