Wednesday, August 28th

School Lunch

It's that time of year again! Across the nation, students, teachers and cafeteria ladies alike can be heard groaning loudly at the thought of the first day of school. For some, the torture has already started; for others, the respite of summer vacation continues till after Labor Day.

With schooldays come school lunches, which is why the start of school also heralds our entry into what I like to call "sandwich season." Yes, yes, sandwiches are so ubiquitous, in the lunch bag and out, that they are often boring. However, the average American adult still eats one hundred and twenty-five sandwiches prepared at home during the course of the year. That's a lot of meat and bread.

In my research about sandwiches, I came across the following facts:

1. Before the recent outbreak of peanut allergies, the average kid ate about 1,500 PB&Js between starting kindergarten and graduating high school.

2. Hoagies, grinders and subs are all the same thing.

3. Top five sandwiches in America: ham; peanut butter and jelly; hamburger; cheese; turkey.

4. There is a restaurant in Greenwich Village called Peanut Butter & Co., which, as you might have guessed, proudly serves a dozen variations of the classic. The restaurant also serves six different kinds of milk, including soy, Lactaid, and rice.

When I was in elementary school, my favorite sandwich – which I was rarely allowed to eat, and never allowed to take to school because my mom was worried that the food police would arrest her – was the Fluffernutter, which is peanut butter and marshmallow fluff on the whitest of white bread. (In my mom's defense, she was looking out for my health, and she did make a mean grilled-cheese-and-tomato.) In any event, I'm not sure I could stomach one now. It's really more like a candy bar than an actual food product.

In high school, I was introduced to several classics of the genre: hot turkey sandwiches with gravy and mashed potatoes; lean pastrami on rye with hot mustard; the tuna melt. In college, where our dining hall had a deli, I think I ate a turkey club on white toast almost every single day for three years. And then, for a period of time, I was often in southern New Jersey, where the cold cuts were unlike any I'd ever had. I still dream of that spicy bologna, which is impossible to find this far south.

Now I take sandwiches to work occasionally for lunch, and we often order from a deli down the street that has pretty good tuna salad and okay reubens. Every once in a while, though, when I want to recreate my own personal sandwich nirvana, I think about the trip to London that I took with my dad, my brother, and my sister. On our last day there, when we were sick of mediocre fish and chips and pizza, we stopped by a little sandwich takeaway that had a few seats in a big airy room. I ordered a turkey sandwich with crispy bacon (having learned during our short sojourn that Britons like their bacon limp) and avocado.

My first bite of that sandwich made me take back almost everything mean I had said about English food over the week we were there. The turkey was fresh-roasted. The avocado, which was plentiful, was perfectly ripe and buttery rich. The bacon was crispy and salty and crunchy. The bread was thick-sliced bakery wheat, toasted to bring out its yeasty aroma. Red onion perked the flavors and brought them together. I ate every speck of that sandwich and considered ordering another.

Which brings me to the most amazing fact I found out in all my research (even more confounding than the fact that the British love sandwiches so much that sandwiches have their own lobbying organization, the British Sandwich Association): the least popular sandwich in America is the BLT. What?? I found this unbelievable! I love BLTs! And then I thought: oh, wait. To have a good BLT, you need to fry bacon (somewhat inconvenient) and have a ripe tasty tomato (often impossible). In fact, as much as I love BLTs, I probably only eat them a couple times a year.

Therefore, in honor of my most memorable sandwich moment, and of the fact that it is finally August and the tomatoes are in, I have posted a recipe for a BLT with avocado on the site this week. If you are vegetarian, you can use veggie bacon strips as long as your avocado and tomato are ripe and delicious. This is not a schoolday sandwich, as I can only promise you one thing: once you eat one of these sandwiches, you will want to eat a second. And those bacon strips cannot be fried up in most classrooms.