Nick Bramham’s Ultimate Club Sandwich
Nick’s take on the iconic sandwich, a sensory riot of textures and flavours – all in one bite.
Good morning, and welcome to Vittles! Today, Nick Bramham celebrates peak tomato season with this recipe for the perfect club sandwich.
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Growing up in rural East Yorkshire, I didn’t think I liked tomatoes. Ketchup I loved, obviously, and Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup with a side of buttered toast was delicious, of course. But fresh tomatoes were vile, nasty things: all plasticky skin and bland, pappy, watery flesh that no amount of salt and pepper could save.
So, when I moved to London and started working in restaurants, peak-season Italian tomatoes were a revelation. Their beguiling sweet-savouriness, their minerality, their juiciness – and the sheer variety: tiny datterini, the size and shape of dates and almost as sweet; torpedo-like San Marzanos for making sugo, passata, and pizza sauce; Piennolo del Vesuivo, bunched up like grapes and hung for weeks, wrinkling as their flavours concentrate; Sicily’s Marinda, slowly grown during the winter months, deliciously saline and crunchy.
Best of all though, and perhaps the ingredient I look forward to the most each year, is the cuore di bue, or bull’s heart tomato – specifically those grown on the sunny foothills of Mount Vesuvius, minimally watered to encourage the plants’ parched roots to dig deep into the volcano’s mineral rich soils. This results in fat, meaty tomatoes with concentrated sugars, thin skins, rich red flesh, few seeds, low water content, and staggering depth of flavour. In short: they’re the perfect sandwich tomatoes. And so, every year I mark their arrival by making a special sandwich.
Sometimes the sandwich is nothing more than thick slices of that fabled tomato, showered with flaky sea salt and black pepper and pressed between slices of heavily buttered sourdough. Sometimes it’s a pane cunzato, in which thin slices of cuore di bue are stuffed into oily focaccia with a couple of anchovies, some olives, Sicilian oregano, and a slice of caciocavallo cheese. Every summer at Quality Wines we use cuore di bues to make a snack-sized version of a BLT with pancetta from rare breed Tuscan pigs and a thick schmear of aioli (we call it a PLT). But this year, I fancied a club sandwich, to celebrate my favourite time of the culinary year, and have spent the past few weeks tweaking my recipe.
As with other cult sandwiches (cf the tuna melt), there are lots of conflicting and unverifiable origin stories about the club, in all likelihood murky myth-making deployed as savvy marketing by high-end hotels, bars, and restaurants (see also: classic cocktails). (The claim that ‘CLUB’ is an acronym for ‘Chicken and Lettuce Under Bacon’ is clearly nonsense.) What is important though, is that at some point in the mid-twentieth century it was generally settled that a club sandwich consisted of three layers of toasted bread, contained either turkey or chicken, either bacon or ham, and lettuce and tomato, and was held together by cocktail sticks and then cut into triangles.
A club sandwich made with great care and good-quality ingredients provides a sensory riot of carefully balanced yet contrasting textures, flavours, and temperatures, all in the same bite: warm, tender, ever so slightly gamey turkey breast, shatteringly crisp and salty smoked bacon, the savoury tang of sun-kissed tomatoes, and the refreshing bite of cold iceberg lettuce, all held together with lightly toasted white bread, generously slathered with good mayonnaise. Something truly transcendent happens when the tomato juices coalesce with the mayonnaise and smoked bacon fat, right before they drip down your chin.
The sad truth, though, is that most club sandwiches fail to live up to this promise. As with all ostensibly simple dishes, there is nowhere to hide, and many potential pratfalls. With that in mind, here are eight tips for guaranteed club sandwich success.
Club Rules
Behind the paywall: Nick’s guide to club sandwich success, plus his perfected recipe.