British Rail Sandwiches: The American Version

As Jim has already explained in his own post about the subject, the British Rail sandwich is a super-weird entrant to encounter in our trip through the Wikipedia list of sandwiches. Not only can you not get an actual British Rail sandwich anymore, you can’t even ride on British Rail–it’s been gone for damn near two decades! However, the metaphorical point that was being made by the colloquial term “British Rail sandwich” is still clear, so rather than attempt Jim’s literal exploration of what the term once literally meant, I decided to take a different direction. After all, tons of British television shows, from X-Factor to The Office to several dozen others, have been remade for modern American audiences. Why not do the same thing with British sandwiches? This question left me with another question: in the 21st century USA I live in, what’s the closest approximation to a sandwich prepared in advance, wrapped up and shipped over a long distance, and eventually consumed by a hurried traveler days after its original creation?

I immediately found myself thinking of the prepared sandwiches one can buy at 7-11. While the immediately-recognizable (at least to most Americans) 24-hour convenience store chain used to be the sort of place where you could only buy prepared foods that had been cooked on a hot dog roller, these days they’ve expanded their offerings greatly–perhaps to compete with gas stations like Sheetz and Wawa, which serve a wide variety of prepared foods to order? Maybe so. But while these days you can get everything from salads and sandwiches to eggs, fruit, and hummus from 7-11, the prepared-on-the-spot items still mostly come from a hot dog roller (there are also pizzas and chicken wings cooked in toaster ovens available at a lot of 7-11s these days). Sandwiches, salads, and other cold food items show up pre-packaged on the back of a truck, and end up lining the shelves of an open-front refrigerated cabinet, like so:

Note fruit and string cheeses also available for your purchasing pleasure.

I’m sure there are a lot of people who take one look at this refrigerated cabinet and think “gross, I don’t want any part of those sandwiches!” However, I’m the sort of guy who will try pretty much anything once (god, if you don’t know that by now, you must not have read any of my other posts), and I’ve been purchasing sandwiches from this cabinet on a semi-regular basis for years now. And the truth is, the comparison to British Rail kinda breaks down once you actually eat one of these things. Maybe it’s just that packaging technology has improved since the days of those terrible British Rail lunch carts, or maybe these are just better sandwiches (I also question how bad the British Rail sandwiches of yore actually were… though in fairness, the whole “bunch up the fillings in the center of the bread to make it look like there’s more stuff on the sandwich” thing is pretty damning), but ummm the truth is 7-11 prepared sandwiches really aren’t that bad! I try to keep the freezer at my work stocked with TV dinners I can heat up at lunchtime, but if I’m out of them or feel like varying up my lunch selection, I will often stop at the 7-11 on the way to my work and grab one of these plus a bag of Baked Lays and a 99 cent tall can of Arizona Arnold Palmer lemonade/iced tea. How good the meal is depends on which sandwich I grab (which in turn depends on what variety of sandwiches they have available), but it’s always at least rather enjoyable, if not quite the most delicious thing ever.

This past week, I stopped at 7-11 and grabbed lunch from the selection of prepared sandwiches twice, so that I could document two different sandwiches from their selection. I started out on Thursday with the one I generally find tastiest and most satisfying: the turkey and Monterey Jack cheese sandwich.

Here it is–couldn’t resist taking a bite before lining up the shot.

This sandwich comes with lettuce and “southwest mayonnaise,” on sliced wheat bread. As you can see, it’s packaged in a plastic triangular container, and sliced diagonally in order to fit in there. This makes it one of the few 7-11 sandwiches that comes closest in appearance to the old British Rail sandwiches. However, it’s significantly more substantial than those things were, if Jim’s recreations were any indication. I didn’t manage to notice the net wt statistics on the label, but I can tell you that this is a good filling sandwich that, accompanied by a bag of chips and a drink, makes for a solid version of the noontime meal. I’m not sure exactly how the southwest mayonnaise condiment differs from regular mayonnaise (or regular southwest sauce, for that matter… I’ve heard plenty about southwest sauce, but haven’t ever consciously sought it out), but it has a tangy appeal that adds spice to this turkey sandwich and keeps the flavor from slipping into blandness. The bread’s never been soggy or dry, in my experience, so that hard plastic shell it’s in must do more than plain old cling-wrap to seal in freshness or whatever. On the whole, it’s pretty delicious, and I suppose there’s a reason why it’s the sandwich I generally reach for first when hitting up a 7-11.

On Friday, I knew in advance that I was going to be in the office alone, so I kind of took my time getting there and getting set up. Where on Thursday I had eaten lunch relatively early (probably about 10:30), my Friday lunch happened closer to the actual noon hour, and I was a little hungrier than I’d been the day before. And so this time, I grabbed a more substantial sandwich from the case: the “pub classic” roast beef on a pretzel roll:

A little fuzzy on what makes this a “pub classic,” but hey, do your thing, 7-11.

This sandwich comes with “chipotle cheddar cheese” (how does one flavor cheddar cheese with chipotle? But that’s what it says on the package), lettuce, and garlic herb sauce. It definitely has an appeal regardless of how the particular specimen I pull from the cabinet at 7-11 has been put together, but there are always a couple of concerns with it as well. For example, as you can see from the photo, there’s quite a bit more meat at the right end of the sandwich than at the left. What you don’t see, because I wiped most of it up, is the glob of garlic herb sauce that had slopped over the bottom edge of the bread onto the lower left part of the bun. I stood in 7-11 for about 30 seconds attempting to decide between this sauce-slopped sandwich and another one with lettuce that looked a bit wilted. Ultimately I decided that extra sauce was a much more easily cleaned-up flaw, and grabbed this one.

The pretzel roll is probably the one factor in this sandwich that keeps it from being as good as the previous turkey sandwich. While I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it as hard or inedible, it does have a bit more thickness and resistance to biting/chewing than I’d like a sandwich roll to have, strictly speaking. I wouldn’t mind it having a bit of crunch to it, but that’s a feel that will never be preserved in a sandwich that’s spent 24 to 48 hours in the shipping process before you ever had the chance to buy it. The chewiness it does end up having isn’t a dealbreaker by any means, but it can be a bit of a bummer.

The bread has a decent flavor, though, and the filling of the sandwich is delicious. Once I wiped up that bit of garlic herb sauce, this one avoided any hint of sauce overdose (which is always a problem anytime you order a fast food sandwich–everyone wants to put way too much sauce on everything for some reason). While I had to shift the meat around a bit on the bread before eating in order to be sure I got a good amount of roast beef with every bite, there was enough meat to go around, and the cheese, potential addition of chipotle notwithstanding, was great. Cheddar is my favorite kind of cheese, and is probably the best choice for almost any sandwich (I’d actually like the turkey sandwich even better if it had cheddar rather than Monterey jack, not that Monterey jack is terrible or anything). So yeah, a thoroughly solid lunch entree on the whole from this sandwich as well.

In our modern era, I’m not really sure it’s possible to find a company serving its customers the kind of unappetizing, poorly-preserved crap that British Rail once passed off as sandwiches worth eating (and honestly, if you could find that company, it’s probably an airline). Food preservation technology has improved, and businesses really just seem to take the entire enterprise of offering appetizing food for purchase a lot more seriously. As I mentioned with my earlier Sheetz/Wawa reference, this could even be a response to that old 21st century “free market competition” snake oil that the capitalists are always peddling to you (for reasons of my own, I am particularly reluctant to believe in this explanation). But the benefit of this modern reality is that if you’re ever stuck grabbing lunch in a hurry from a 7-11 on the way to wherever you’re heading, you’re probably gonna be able to buy a pretty decent sandwich. Here at the Sandwich Tribunal, we consider the availability of decent sandwiches to be a fundamentally Good Thing. So hey–cheers to you, 7-11, for not being as bad at making sandwiches as British Rail in 1985.

Drew

I’m a transgender weirdo who loves music, books, comics, and all kinds of other geeky crap. I edit an arts/music/culture magazine in my hometown of Richmond VA (rvamag.com). But let’s not talk about my day job. Let’s talk about food. I love food.