What’s a toast sandwich and why do Gordon Ramsay, Heston Blumenthal and culinary greats think it should be on the menu?
Our nomination for the saddest sandwich in existence, the toast sandwich is a slice of toast compressed between two pieces of bread – that’s right, not even the name is original
British food used to be a punch line. “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad,” then-French President Jacques Chirac remarked in 2005. “The only thing [the British] have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease.”
Fortunately for Brits, since then the country has experienced a “food renaissance” that led trendsetters Vice to declare “British food is taking over the world”. From Gordon Ramsay to The Great British Bake Off, British cuisine has probably never been so highly regarded.
What kind of culinary inventions – dodgy beef aside – led to the caustic remarks of the French President? Probably something like the toast sandwich.
So thoroughly inoffensive it’s an affront to more creative cooking (which means just about every other dish in existence), this item is a relic of the dark days of British culinary history. Our nomination for most insipid sandwich in existence, the toast sandwich is a slice of toast compressed between two pieces of bread. That’s right, not even the name is original.
The uninspiring dish can be traced back nearly 160 years to Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management, which went on to sell two million copies, where it is prescribed for those suffering illness.
“Place a very thin piece of cold toast between two slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich, adding a seasoning of pepper and salt,” the recipe instructs. “This sandwich may be varied by adding a little pulled meat, or very fine slices of cold meat, to the toast, and in any of these forms will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.”
Other flavoursome winners from Mrs Beeton’s stock of recipes include toast soup: 1lb (0.45kg) of bread crusts boiled in 2oz (0.05kg) of butter and a quart (1.1 litres) of “common stock” – toast and water. Best, presumably, for those unable to handle the exceptional richness of the toast sandwich – which is produced by toasting a slice of stale bread and then soaking it in a quart (1.1 litres) of boiling water until it has cooled.
Just make sure you don’t leave the mix on the side too long. “If drunk in a tepid or lukewarm state, it is an exceedingly disagreeable beverage,” cautioned the Mrs Beeton.
As the Dickensian squalor of Victorian Britain gradually faded into history, so too did the toast sandwich, for obvious reasons.
