Your handmade sandwich? Built just like a Ford

A kitchen hack for a production line of celebratory finger sandwiches

Just north of the A40, a major transport artery into and out of London from Wales and the west of England, lies an area that might be called London’s Kitchen.

Here in Park Royal are acres of warehouses devoted to the preparation of the take-out foods that Londoners scoff all across the city - at their desks, on trains, and in the Tube and on buses (locations banned in other capitals), and, with the onset of summer, in parks. High-end ready-meals, named and packaged to look as if your granny had prepared them especially for you, and convincing enough to pretend to your friends that you had, come out of the same security-gated compounds as low-end ready-meals, their packaging and flavourings the only way to distinguish sunset-coloured Chinese feasts from Indian ones, and vice versa.

At metres of conveyor belts, women (it’s women for the most part) stand stock still all day long inside chilly depots, as mummified in safety clothing as if Covid were still an issue (which, of course, it is), putting together at almost breakneck speed the ingredients scooting down the belt, to create the sandwiches you will be buying in your supermarket, coffee shop or deli outlet in much the same way a car is assembled. 

A ‘Meal Deal’ sandwich may very possibly have been made at exactly the same depot that produced your ‘handmade’ sandwich costing twice the price of that clammy bread creation sold with a drink and snack thrown in. They were both handmade.

Food cities like this squat in the suburbs of every major conurbation and capital around the developed world, striving to bring that ‘home-made’ feel from factory to you. A stroll through these zones anywhere would show you otherwise. Your sandwich or ready-meal leaves these industrial no-man’s lands heading for your local pick-up not in family vans with cheery tag lines emblazoned on their sides, but in anonymous eighteen-wheeler trucks, all through the day and all through the night.

In 2020, at the production hubs across the UK of Greencore, a Dublin-based company whose slogan is to ‘make every day taste better’, 619,000,000 million sandwiches were manufactured. (Even they don’t use the word ‘made’.) They were delivered to 10,000 convenience and travel outlets, discounters, coffee shops, garages, food-service and other retailers, each day across the British Isles. Although individual, pricey, hand-built sandwich makers are sprouting in hip city neighbourhoods, Britain doesn't have the made-to-order sandwich chains familiar in the United States.

The Earl of Sandwich would be amazed.

The 4th Earl of Sandwich by Thomas Gainsborough

An 18th century aristocrat, John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich, has been credited with inventing Britain’s greatest contribution to gastronomy. Not wishing to leave the card table, he would command his valet to bring him salt beef between two slices of toast. His fellow cribbage players took to saying, in ‘When Harry Met Sally’ vein, “I’ll have what he’s having”, calling simply for “a Sandwich”.

But history would argue that Sandwich did not inspire the first one. The Chinese general Bai Qi did, and it was called the Rou jia mo.

Translated as ‘meat sandwich’, the rou jia mo developed in two stages. Originating in the Shaanxi province in north-west China, the bread or ‘mo’ dates back to the Qin dynasty of 221-206 BC and earlier. Bai Qi was known, with the greatest respect, as the God of War and the Killing Machine. Throughout his lifetime he led over 70 wars, and was responsible for the deaths on battlefields of around one million people. The rou jia mo was created in response to his requiring readily accessible food rations for his troops while on the march. During the Zhou dynasty which ruled China from 1046 BC, meat, commonly pork stewed for hours in a spicily seasoned soup, had been stuffed into the rou jia mo. Today’s roujiamo is said by some to be China’s most popular street food, for much the same reasons the sandwich is that of the British.

It sounds a good deal more healthy. In his recently published book Ravenous, Britain’s ex-food czar Henry Dimbleby (resigning in disgust and dismay at the government’s inaction over obesity), writes of buying an egg sandwich on a train. He analyses its ingredients. This lunch, labelled ‘handmade’, contained 32, most of them unknown to Mother Nature. The actual egg is only listed at number 22, following potassium sorbate.

This is the time of year when the sandwich has a field day, so to speak, expanding from desks and behind the steering wheel to picnics in parks, the countryside and on beaches.

And also at school events. In my Washington DC days, I participated annually in “International Day”, when schools require parents to present their nation’s traditional food at terminally chipper community get-togethers of high competitiveness. What could possibly be described as Britain’s national dish? Marmalade on toast? The Full English breakfast? Spotted Dick? (That’s a steamed pudding studded with raisins popular with men who’ve had a privileged education and frequently end up in Parliament on Conservative front benches). 

I settled on the sandwich. Not those clammy 6- or 7-bite triangles, but elegant crustless finger sandwiches, of smoked salmon, egg-and-cress, and cucumber. The brief was to provide enough food of whatever sort to feed 60. That’s a lot of buttering and slicing without the equipment available to Park Royal’s sandwich manufacturers. Given it’s highly likely that some of you will be faced with similar projects over the coming summer weeks, I thought I’d offer you this brilliant hack I invented (I refuse to be coy - it's really good) for making life simple. 

Buy a large sandwich loaf. Carefully slice off its crusts on all sides. Set out your ingredients and a room temperature slab of butter that’s become really squishy. Next, slice your loaf not across as usual, but lengthwise. Butter each long slice with the softened butter, spread it with your ingredients, lay over your buttered second slice then cut into fingers. A breeze. And genuinely homemade to boot. Extra hack: If your serrated bread knife tears at the crumb, stick the loaf in the freezer to firm it up quite a bit before proceeding, buttering the slices before they defrost.