Plan B Forum

When did sandwiches get to be $10 plus? Or perhaps the real question should be — when did sandwiches divide themselves up into social classes?



Laugh if you will, but I have strong and fond memories of a very humble tomato and cheese white-bread sandwich with a smear of very commercial mayonnaise, made to order, and for which I paid about $3 at a corner store/milk bar down the road from an old Bris-Vegas workplace years ago. A proud and honest working-class sandwich. And what about the staunch salad roll: wholemeal or white, grated cheese and carrot, beetroot and lettuce, tomato, perhaps some ham or chicken. Does anyone still make one? Did we lose something intrinsically Australian when we discovered baguettes and focaccias, paninis and wraps and turned sandwiches into status symbols?

Could there be starker evidence of the sandwich social divide than the situation in our work canteen, operated by George Gregan’s catering company, GG Espresso? One cold cabinet with five buck “Grab and Go” packs: ham, cheese and tomato; chicken, lettuce and mayonnaise; egg and lettuce. And then, looking down their haughty noses at their bread-and-butter brethren, the sandwiches on Sonoma bread in a separate swish cabinet: smoked turkey, lemon-pepper chicken, pastrami on light rye. All around the $8 mark. The “organic wholemeal healthy salad” wrap at $10.

But really, with all due respect to Mr Gregan, his sandwiches are not in the upper echelons of sandwich society. The nobility of sandwiches are found elsewhere; at places such as Earl Canteen in Bourke Street, Melbourne, where the big seller is crisp skin free-range pork belly with apple, cabbage & fennel coleslaw and wilted silverbeet (“we make sandwiches, just not as you know it”), and Neil Perry’s Spice Temple (“the guangxi pork sandwich at Spice Temple is simply incredible,” chef Dan Hong tells me on Twitter. No comment needs to be made about the recurring ingredient here…)

So highbrow have sandwiches become that they’ve made it on to restaurant menus across the land. Matt Wilkinson has made a special feature of them at Pope Joan in Melbourne’s East Brunswick. Think “the Cuban” (pulled pork, pickles n cheese), “the Cornish” (Milawa chook, stuffing, jalapeno) and a vitello tonnato number (tuna, veal, peppers and capers). “World-title-winning”, says regular correspondent @onetui of Wilkinson’s sandwich work.

http://www.dailylife.com.au/dl-food/soc ... 1x75m.html

n Delorean's book of many years ago revealed that the manufacturing cost of a Cadillac Sedan de Ville was only several hundred dollars more than that of a Chevrolet Caprice, yet the retail price was several THOUSAND dollars more.