I learned to appreciate tomato sandwiches and savor culinary beef | Rebecca May Johnson

Every few months, someone on social media proclaims a rule about how an ingredient or dish should be cooked or eaten, like it's gospel. The only way to cook X is… You should never eat X… X is a cursed dish… The only acceptable time to eat X is when… In response, other users erupt in anger, anger and excitement, and state a plethora of ways in which they reject the rule. The rule is stupid! Exit the rule! The rule disregards all things cooking!

I personally eat culinary beef – as a spectator, at least. The last line revolved around a question: is a tomato sandwich a real sandwich? A few weeks ago, the American writer Geraldine DeRuiter inflamed opinion with a single tweet (since deleted). "I'm sorry food Twitter but a 'tomato sandwich' isn't a sandwich, you just don't have the ingredients to make a BLT."

The rebuttals have been growing and fast for days. I enjoyed this rage in two distinct ways: First, during the time the tomato sandwich debate was "live", I read hundreds of methods for putting tomatoes on bread and I 've seen dozens of pictures of delicious sandwiches. Cultural stories of tomato served with bread and regional traditions of “tomato sandwich season” were shared and championed. I had the opportunity to discover the varied contexts in which people eat two ingredients that I really like. Receipts abounded; it was as if I was eating while I read.

Second, the affront to this rule caused me to reflect on my own understanding of a sandwich at the tomato, then sandwiches in general. And I wasn't the only one. Food writer and Vittles founder Jonathan Nunn hit back at DeRuiter with a different rule, saying "a tomato sandwich isn't just a thing of beauty, it's literally the only time tomatoes are allowed in sandwiches", and continued to give her recipe: "toasted bread, possibly buttered. one, plump, sliced ​​tomato, olive oil, salt, pepper. half a jar of mayonnaise. maybe a single anchovy, for a treat.”

I thought of Nunn's rule. I disagreed that a tomato sandwich was the only viable opportunity to include berries. A tomato sandwich I make often includes bread, thick butter, salami, and tomato. Recently, too, I've taken a nostalgic relish in “salad sandwiches”: crisp lettuce, cucumber, tomato, cheese or ham, butter or margarine, maybe watercress. But also, I realized that I hadn't previously considered mayonnaise as an important element in a tomato-based sandwich. I had planned to try Nunn's recipe with a tomato from my batch.

As wildly varying photos of "tomato sandwiches" flooded my timeline, I wondered. wondered: what is a sandwich? Of course, the fun is that any new rule I might make about defining a sandwich will cause other people to make other rules. You could say that a sandwich is a site for pure rule-making, where the only basis for rule-making anyone has to observe is: do I like this? Even though there is a long held rule of how to make a sandwich, it is inevitable that each person who practices this tradition will step in with their own revised understanding, their own palate, shaped by their own circumstances in life.

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However, I go there with, at the very least, an opinion on sandwiches which I might even call the sandwich theory. What I love about sandwiches is how the bread works as a structure that "holds" us and gives space to our needs at different times. When I need comfort: cheddar cheese, butter and my mother's lemon and pear chutney. If I want to teleport the feeling of being on a greasy spoon: fried egg and ketchup, with a cup of strong tea as an extension of the sandwich, sipped between bites. To relive the memory of being in Barcelona with my friend Zoë: boiled egg and raw tomatoes sliced ​​with salt and pepper.

The reassuring limits of a sandwich embolden those who otherwise lack confidence or cooking experience. My father, who generally defers to my mother in culinary matters, likes to experiment with multiple con...