Rock Bottom: the Toast Sandwich

This is what it’s come to, all these years of the sandwich life, diving into all that the sandwich world has to offer. One day you want a sandwich and you realize all you have to put between bread is more bread. Your eye darts from the loaf of bread to the toaster and back–to toast, or not to toast? Of course you want to toast the bread, but all of it? That’s a lot of dry, crunchy, toasted bread to bite into. So you toast the center slice, then season it with salt and pepper, why not? and put it between two slices of untoasted, buttered bread. It’s almost civilized that way, you try to convince yourself. Shuddering, you close your eyes and take a bite.

This dramatization of how the toast sandwich came to be has been 100% inaccurate. Instead, the recipe was first published in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, in the chapter entitled Invalid Cookery.

And here is the very thing, straight from Mrs. Beeton, through me, to you. Starting with buttered bread

You stick a piece of cold dry toast on there, with a little salt and pepper

Then you top it with another piece of buttered bread.

That’s it. That’s the sandwich.

So I tried it. The difference in texture between the untoasted bread and the toasted–and I used different, better bread for the toast than I did for the sandwich–combined with the salt and pepper made it almost taste like something. Almost.

There’s got to be something you can do with that toast though, to make it seem more like a sandwich with an actual filling. What can you put on toast that makes it taste like more than toast?

OK, well that’s a little extreme but why not? The whole point of Vegemite is to combine it with enough butter and bread that it tastes less like eating a bouillon cube straight.

Now normally you wouldn’t spread straight Vegemite on a piece of cold toast like this without any butter, or at least I wouldn’t. But there’s butter on the bread below and above, and three slices of bread in total. That should be enough to fight Vegemite’s natural tendency to make everything taste like Vegemite.

The Vegemite toast sandwich tasted… like Vegemite. And bread. So much bread.

What other kinds of toast do people eat that we could put into a toast sandwich to make it worthwhile?

There’s avocado toast, of course, that hipster meme of a few years back. It’s tasty stuff, to be sure–mashed avocado, mixed with a little citrus juice, tomato, and salt, spread on toast. It’s a healthy and filling snack and it’s just plain good.

Stuck between two slices of buttered, untoasted white bread though, it is no longer quite as healthy or delicious. It’s just a silly mess, with avocado goop squishing out the sides on every bite.

Pan con tomate, or Pa amb tomàquet, or Tomato toast, consists of bread that’s been lightly brushed with olive oil and toasted under a broiler, lightly rubbed with a cut garlic clove, topped with a bit of tomato pulp, salt, and extra virgin olive oil. It’s a staple of Catalan cuisine and Tapas bars, and featured heavily in our post on Spanish Montaditos two years ago. When it’s late summer and we can’t walk through our garden without tripping over tomatoes, it’s a constant presence at our house as well.

And it’s fine here. The tiny bit of raw garlic rubbed onto the toast goes a long way. But it’s kind of like eating a cheeseless pizza between two slices of bread. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather just have the pizza.

OK, it’s time to bring out the big guns. Let’s roast some marrow bones.

These are beef femur bones, cut lengthwise with a bandsaw, acquired for very little at a local grocery store. Twenty minutes or so in a hot oven turns them into this.

Earlier this year, Mindy, the boys and I had lunch for her birthday at a Hungarian coffee shop in Chicago called FINOM. Among the dishes we sampled was something they called “Head Marrow Toast,” though I don’t believe actual marrow was involved based on the menu description. It was very much like a salad with a little bit of pate on toasted multigrain bread, which was delicious enough in its own way.

Marrow toast is a common enough preparation for roasted bone marrow though–the fatty substance is scooped out of the bones and spread onto toast points, served as-is or with a variety of accoutrements. I wanted something bright to serve as a counterpoint for the richness of the bone marrow, so I made gremolata to go with it.

Gremolata is a mixture of finely chopped parsley, lemon zest, and raw garlic, often served with rich meat dishes such as ossu buco. The sharpness of the raw garlic and the brightness of the citrus oils are partially calmed by the parsley, which is sometimes used to lessen the effect of garlic on one’s breath. Still, it’s a powerful combination, and well-suited to the task of adding dimension to a dish that, otherwise, would be all starch and fat.

Lest you all think me a monster, yes, I did give a couple of these bones to my dog afterward. And yes, I did eat some of the marrow toast in non-sandwich form, and it was fantastic. Sadly, this slice of marrow toast had a different destiny awaiting it.

I’ll be honest, I was hoping that this would be the best of the bunch, and that it would somehow prove that a toast sandwich could be worthwhile. It was not, and it did not–the tomato toast sandwich was the best of the bunch, yet every one of these items would have fared far better without being smothered in a pillowy bread coffin. That was it, I’d taken my shot and had failed to make a decent toast sandwich. I was all out of ideas.

That wasn’t it. I wasn’t out of ideas.

Three Happiness restaurant in Chinatown is notable for at least one reason. Called “Little” Three Happiness by some, due to the presence at one time of a larger restaurant called Three Happiness directly across the street, it is the namesake for well-known Chicago “foodie” forum LTHForum.com, where Mindy and I made some of our first friends when we moved to Chicago 13 years ago.

It is also the first place where I tried a common dim sum item called “Shrimp Toast.” Recently, Mindy and I stopped back in, had some shrimp toast and chow fun noodles, and brought along a loaf of bread and some butter.

These little snacks consist of a shrimp filling, similar to what one would find in a shu mai, stuffed into a small bread slice and held in place with a bit of wonton wrapping, then deep-fried until crisp, hot, and juicy. The waitress, the same tiny old woman who waited on us during our first visit 13 years ago, raised an eyebrow when she saw me spreading them with chili oil and placing them on buttered bread. “They good that way?” she asked, smiling for what I think may have been the first time in my experience.

“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. Then I put the second slice of buttered bread on top and tried it.

This was the answer. This was the version of a toast sandwich that somehow worked above all others. This is likely due to the fact that there is such a high proportion of it that is not simply toast, so that the sandwich feels more like a shrimp burger with a bit of crisp crouton around it. Or maybe it was because the filling was piping hot, rather than cold the way Mrs. Beeton said it should be. The chili oil definitely helped as well, a condiment I feel certain Mrs. Beeton would not have approved for any invalids in her care.