The club sandwich is the greatest sandwich of all time. It beats even the deli Reuben, the katsu sando, the banh mi and the bifana. A friend to travellers, weary and alone, the club is a timeless creation that works just as well at midnight as it does at midday.
What makes a perfect one? An awkward question because people like different things. Some prefer slivers of avocado and eggs fried. Some prefer no egg at all. Probably the only binding motion is the fact a club must always be served with French fries and an assortment of condiments in shiny metal pots.
The traditional recipe was simpler than it is today. Most generally believe the first composition originated in the Union Club in New York sometime in the late 1800s. Back then it was only a double decker and comprised a layer of turkey or chicken with ham. Crucially, it was served warm and called for sliced white bread.
The first reference came in an edition of The Evening World, a long since defunct New York paper, on November 18 1889, and which said: "Have you tried a Union Club sandwich yet? Two toasted pieces of Graham bread, with a layer of turkey or chicken and ham between them, served warm.” Soon the sandwich was replicated around the world and chefs took it upon themselves to tweak the recipe; add and take-away.
And so the club has evolved over the years. Though the best are still delivered warm — but only just, as the wilting of salad must be avoided — and use the whitest, most nondescript sliced white bread, crusts removed, today a form of egg is usually involved and bacon is used in lieu of ham almost always. Lettuce and tomatoes, these cultivating the oft-cited name, “chicken, lettuce and tomato under bacon”, were early additions, while mayonnaise has been omnipresent since anyone can remember unless there’s a request for it to be removed.
It’s hard to pinpoint when the club moved to become a triple-decker, with the salad on the underside and the turkey or chicken above. These days the three-way construction constitutes lore and one without three slices of bread would be turned away by diehard fans. The club is one of those foods about which people have fierce opinions, if not clear guidelines of subjectability.
Like many famous, historical foods, the club is personal. My ideal version is thus: lightly toasted (scored on a grill, ideally) cheap white bread, the sort used in children’s lunches in the 1990s; crisp streaky bacon, sliced and mixed with chopped boiled egg, these bound together with shop-bought mayonnaise (Hellmann’s); smoked turkey rather than chicken; shredded lettuce and thinly sliced tomatoes; lots and lots of black pepper.
It’s not just preference that dictates the club, but geography, time and place, maybe even access to ingredients. In Montreal, clubs are always prepared with rotisserie chicken, rarely contain egg and are served cold; in Magaluf they are usually hot and made with sliced ham and melted cheese, presumably because almost everyone is hungover when they have one; and at the legendary Paris bistro Les Deux Magots, the club is more rustic and hefty, sliced in half rather than into quarters, and is made with good, firm cooked chicken, back bacon, rocket, juicy tomatoes and sliced boiled eggs, all this inside firmly toasted bread.
The sandwich varies more between café and hotel. In the former, there’s less guarantee the bread will be dainty and crustless. It will be a more rough and ready affair, while the most upmarket hotels will be precise and elegant in their creations all the way up to the cocktail stick, which is more likely to resemble a toothpick than a chopstick.
Really, due to history, time and circumstance, clubs are best in hotels, the more luxurious the better for the most part. They should be a single sandwich sliced into quarters and these appear best when circling a portion of French fries. Here’s another thing — the situation during which one is ordered. Feeling is everything because the best are eaten at a low-lit bar after a long flight, perhaps with an extremely crisp, cold schooner of lager, or else as room service, arriving beneath a cloche and on a smooth trolley, possibly with a bottle, or half-bottle, of Champagne. I also think clubs are best eaten alone, despite the fact they are perfectly shared.
