With barely a week to go till I embark upon my picnic, I am not even halfway through the picnic-game alphabet. H is for ham sandwiches, and that seems to be about it.
Ham sandwiches in my family have a very stringent pedigree. Since time immemorial, they were made on caraway-seed rye bread, preferably bakery-baked — none of that squidgy consistency, especially in matters of crust.
The ham, thinly sliced but not in the modern heap-of-shavings way, was always plain boiled ham. I think usually Polish or other eastern European style. No other provenance, certainly no flavorings. That lets out Black Forest, smoked, hickory-smoked, maple-drenched and all other modern disguises. Today, Boar’s Head makes a tasty version, but the sliced, boiled ham of my youth wasn’t branded, it was just what you got in the deli when you asked for “boiled ham, please.”
(It might have been Boar’s Head, now I think of it. It was a German deli.)
Each family member, in my first-family, had their own preference for moisturizing the sandwich. My dad liked mustard. French’s yellow ballpark was fine, until he discovered Grey Poupon. Which was fine until Pommery brought out its first, imported, whole grain mustard — then it topped all others. My mother went for mayonnaise. Hellman’s bottled — I never saw anyone make homemade mayo until I went to college, and then it was someone showing off with a blender. (It didn’t end well.) My grandma preferred butter.
Each person turned up their nose at the other’s choice, although no one was ever rude about it. They just wouldn’t touch the leftover half-sandwich on the platter.
What was an only child to do? Until my palate grew up to mustard, that was too strong. The butter just seemed … awkward … with the dill pickle spear that tradition also placed on the plate. I opted for mayo, like my mother.
A simple sandwich wasn’t that simple
Oh, and there’s another thing about our family’s ham sandwiches. Nine times out of ten, they were actually ham-and-cheese sandwiches. Never American processed cheese — that was reserved for grilled cheese on white bread. Always Swiss cheese, the holier the better. Like the ham, it was likely unbranded.
Even after I moved to New York City and had the world’s cuisines before me, the pattern of perfect sandwich remained unrevised. It charmed me when Vladimir Estragon*, in The Village Voice, wrote about the Ideal Sandwich. His parents brought it to him when he was in the hospital, as a treat, a diversion, from boring hospital fare. It was
Thick slices of roast pork, lettuce and tomato, white bread. … I can still, in my mind’s mouth, taste that sandwich whenever I want… the memory is there not just when I choose to call it up, but continually present as an ideal, informing all other sandwiches.
Waiting for Dessert, Viking Press, 1982
Prompted by his roast pork sandwich, and my pork-adjacent meditations, I recall an essay that ranged far from the city’s streets. Estragon wrote “A Dissertation upon Roast Ambivalence” in, I think, the early 1980s. Channeling Charles Lamb (author of A Dissertation upon Roast Pig), he, too, writes about the transition of a live pig to a roasted delicacy. But Estragon’s elegy is also about the passing of the traditional, Long Island farm country, rural gathering at harvest time. City folks began to build second homes, cheek-by-jowl with the farmyard, and complain — almost as loudly as a stuck pig.
How change changes our hunger
The days of Long Island potato farms were already passing when Estragon attended that pig roast. Vineyards had already replaced much of the farmland even as he wrote. I went out to the East End many summers, with friends, boyfriends, and finally a husband. We’d sip Chardonnays as soft as sunsets. We’d stop at a roadside shack for fried clams. Then, following the sun west, a farmstand for corn-on-the-cob. We’d watch for a car on the side of the road for (probably illegal) lobsters…
Now, the glamorous sprawl of resort-land gobbles up villages, clam shacks and farmstands, and likely imperils the vineyards themselves. I haven’t been out there in a long while now. Every now and then, I run the roads in my mind’s eye. But when memory fails at some intersection and I turn to Google’s ubiquitous StreetView, I usually find the intersection unrecognizable.
Would I be as hungry for a ham-and-swiss-on-rye from the old deli on Main Street if I knew for sure I could get one tomorrow? Or is it the longing for a table reserved for memories that makes it so desirable?
Would I want to drive the long, sandy road out to Montauk as badly if I knew for certain the farmstands and clam shacks were still there?
Who can say.
For now, I’m hungry enough to forage the fridge for an undistinguished slice of ham, a bit of sourdough bread, and an ear of supermarket corn.
My heart broke when I learned Estragon had died during my long years’ absence from New York. I found his obituary — for his real self, Geoffrey Stokes — in 1996, when I went back to the city to research a novel I never finished.