Forty years ago this spring, the supermarket sandwich was born. Despite a deeply unappetising start (M&S’s debut salmon and tomato filling reads like a dire omen), the packaged sandwich proved irresistible. Today, it is a £5.6bn-a-year industry that dominates the to-go lunch market.
Yet bizarrely, given the scale of that penetration, the subject of this month’s How to Eat is rarely discussed in detail. Perhaps that is the insidious genius of what Sam Knight brilliantly christened “the sandwich-industrial complex”. It so neatly fulfils a need in time-poor late-capitalist societies that we meekly accept it without objection.
“Sandwiches freed us from the fork, the dinner table, the fixed mealtime. In a way, they freed us from society itself. We may lament this or we may welcome it, but there is not much point in fighting it. This is the way we eat now,” Bee Wilson wrote in her 2010 book Sandwich: A Global History.
If it is impossible to see a future without the supermarket sandwich – its convenience is often invaluable – there is nonetheless a case to be made that Britain should wean itself off its sandwich habit and try to make its own lunch more often. The industrial sandwich market is a huge culprit in creating unrecyclable food packaging waste and, it is calculated, the same CO2 annually as 8.6m cars. If not for the planet, act to save yourself a few quid, rather than accepting supermarket sandwiches as an inescapable, functional necessity.
Could the way forward be to eat fewer supermarket sandwiches but get more out of them when we do? In that case, How to Eat (HTE) – the series exploring how best to enjoy our most popular foods – has a plan.
The joy of repetition
It is difficult to believe Dominic Raab could be right about anything. He is a man to ruin rather than capture the public mood. But, in 2018, when it was revealed our foreign secretary eats the same lunch every day – a Pret chicken caesar baguette – many will have nodded in knowing approval. In repeated surveys, as many as one in eight of us have confessed (is this anything to feel guilty about?) to eating the same lunch every day. For years and years.
Such statistics are often reported, if only subliminally, as evidence of British society’s ingrained conservatism. We don’t like faff. Or new-fangled. Or foreign. Food is fuel. We want to get back to our desks and Mail Online’s sidebar of shame without having to confront Sainsburys’ smoked carrot and cream cheese sandwich. Famously, 80% of sandwich sales are derived from a handful of core flavours; several of them, such as the BLT and chicken salad, are monstrosities.
A more generous reading of that predictability is that supermarket sandwiches are almost universally terrible. Why experiment, when from routine disappointment at Boots to Waitrose’s frequent woeful inability to fulfil your expectations, most store-bought sangers are hangers, misery encased in malted granary. We have all found the nearest store, its least worst sandwich, a tolerable filling, and will hang in there until it shuts. We cling to Nurse for fear of something worse.
A pet theory
HTE is convinced that each supermarket is only capable of producing (sorry, sourcing from a huge sandwich manufacturer), one truly good sandwich at any one time. Finding that sandwich is fraught. You have been stung. You do not want to try new things. But, occasionally, a filling presents itself that, in terms of offering savoury depth, acidic poke, moistness and textural heft, is clearly going to operate at a higher level. It will actually deliver discernible flavour straight from the chiller cabinet.
Even if you only ever eat these sandwiches in an emergency, it is useful to know that the top three currently on sale in Britain are:
1. Sainsbury’s ham hock and mature cheddar, £3 Juicy hock and a genuinely beery, fruity ale chutney dovetail nicely with the cheddar, and simultaneously ensure a refreshing moistness.
2. M&S New York deli pastrami, £3.30 M&S used to do a posher, better, bagged version, but this combo of pickles, sauerkraut and peppery pastrami still delivers relative bang for your buck.
3. Waitrose Heston from … salt beef pretzel sub, £3.60 The lone star in the inky blackness of Waitrose’s sandwich range. But grab a really fresh one or that pretzel sub is like chewing through the arm of a sofa.
Choice of filling
It is crucial to have a mental road map in place that, in the absence of the rare examples above, will help you navigate this gastronomically barren terrain.
The list of generally reliable fillings is short. For instance, egg mayo (and/or cress), triple cheese or tuna mayo and cucumber are all familiar nursery flavours that withstand the rigours of the chiller cabinet reasonably well (eg, sliced cucumber stays crisp). Smoked ham and cheese is similarly difficult to ruin entirely. And while it may be hard in 2020 to justify regularly eating the beef they traditionally accompany, any sandwich that contains pickles, sauerkraut or mustard will usually deliver some flavour. Look out for rye bread, too, for an additional layer of interest.
The list of fillings to avoid is much, much longer, ranging as it does from anything involving chicken (invariably it will have a cotton wool texture) to falafel (must never feature on sandwich bread), via pesto and mozzarella (a cold, rubbery puck), salmon and cream cheese (like a putty butty) and tuna swamped by revolting quantities of sweetcorn. Even before we consider peripheral issues of underfilling or stale, soggy bread, a good 65% of the options are actively unpleasant.
Anything involving salad should be avoided (it inevitably delivers zero flavour), while, conversely, attempts to inject va-va-voom using a pickle, stuffing or chutney should be approached with extreme caution. Not only are such components poor when mass-produced, they are unavoidably prominent in sandwiches, the dominant flavour usually. That can be ruinous if they clang with your palate.
Two perennially popular and appalling sandwiches worthy of special mention are the all-day breakfast and the BLT. Serving cold, leathery bacon in any circumstances should be a criminal offence. Worked into the general all-day breakfast slurry, it is particularly awful. Note: experts have concluded that the all-day breakfast sandwich has the largest carbon footprint of any sandwich, equal to driving 12 miles. That justifies a two-mile detour to buy a tastier, greener lunch (a salad, say, from M&S’s Plant Kitchen range).
As for the BLT, can there be a convenience product that has travelled so far from its original conception? The still-warm, toasted BLT, full of newly fried streaky bacon, thick with mayo and properly seasoned, room-temperature lettuce and tomatoes, can be wonderful. The drab, cold supermarket version (the volatile compounds that give tomatoes their flavour chilled into inertia), is more a deliberate provocation, a faint echo of the original just recognisable enough to make you acutely aware of the pleasure you are being denied.
Oh … and never eat any supermarket sandwich described as low-calorie.
Filling forensics
In 2018, Channel 5’s Shop Smart: Save Money found almost half the sandwiches it tested contained less than the advertised filling. The amount of filling in comparable sandwiches can also differ widely. At the time, the Boots prawn mayo contained just 22% prawns compared with M&S’s 41%.
In short, the struggle against under- and meanly filled sandwiches is real. Yet, having settled on a flavour, HTE has found no easy way to judge the sandwiches on the shelf against one another, to find the fullest. You can try the pinch test (gently squeezing the cartons to gauge plumpness), while some swear by examining the cut ends of sandwiches to find those that look as if they have a thicker filling. But in HTE’s experience neither test is particularly reliable, another reason to avoid supermarket sandwiches. That surge of resentment on opening a dramatically underfilled one is an unhealthy emotion.
Jazzing up your sandwich
This is difficult, given they are usually eaten in transit, away from home. But most supermarket sandwiches benefit from a (filling-dependent) extra layer of salt’n’vinegar or ready-salted crisps. It adds the seasoning and textural contrast so many manufacturers neglect. Additional pickled gherkins, homemade coleslaw or mayo can also elevate a mundane supermarket sandwich into the heady realms of acceptable.
Where?
HTE has a rule that, when eating outdoors, cold weather requires hot food (soup, pasty, pies etc), and vice versa in summer. In winter, on your lunch hour, it is possible to sit in a freezing, windy shopping precinct and feel you are stealing precious me-time back from The Man if you have hot, warming food in your hands. In contrast, speed-eating a cold sandwich on a cold bench on a grey Tuesday in March is likely to trigger a full existential crisis about the cosmic unfairness of the nine to five.
Better to flee back to the warmth of the office or save that sandwich for the bus or train where you will at least be able to feel your own fingers. But please remember that, on public transport, folding your sandwich carton flat and stuffing it down the side of the seat is (second only to leaving the box and half-eaten crusts on the seat) an absolute no-no.
When?
While gourmet sandwich restaurants blaze a trail for the adoption of the sandwich as an evening meal, the push by high-street sandwich slingers to conquer “the evening day part” feels like a fait accompli. Dreary as it may feel at 7pm or 10pm, in frenetic, time-warped, overworked 21st-century Britain, we increasingly find ourselves relying on the supermarket chiller cabinet. You may find that sad. You may find that liberating. But it would require a radical restructuring of society to alter that reality, not merely some inspirational recipes for better homemade lunches.
Drink
Pop of some description. That is a lot of malted granary to masticate. You need fizz and that extra hose pressure to swill your mouth out.
So, supermarket sandwiches, how do you eat yours?
