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| In which I sample a range of pre-prepared sandwiches from the nation's grocers |
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| Talk,
Mr Harbour-Barbour,
16 January 1999 | |
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Saturday afternoons always find me in a peckish mood. I’m always too tired to sit down a make a good healthy pack lunch and inevitably I find myself drawn to the pre-packaged sandwiches available in many a good corporate grocery. Four years ago I remember well finding amongst a mountain of boring Boot’s sandwiches, a sparkling savoury diamond that I’ll always remember as the Boot’s Pizzawich. A Tasty brown bread concoction with all the ingredients of a good pizza stuffed into a delicious wedge. I was always loathe to spend excess pennies on something I could create in my home, but the exciting feel of ripping open a fresh pack of sandwiches has since gripped me like some ghetto drug habit.
So in recent weekends I find myself salivating over what has become an army of tasty savoury treats. But the riddle remains, where do the truly great sandwiches come from?
Boots is no longer the Shangri-La it was, the brand quality is high, but the fillings have become rather mundane.
Pret-a-Manger (which one would expect to be the obvious outlet for quality) displays a range that taste too dry, and at prices that make me wince.
Safeways are extremely vigilant in the end-of-sale reductions, and they do sell a pleasingly moist chicken-themed multipack, but are also responsible for some miserable prawns dotted sparingly and drowned in mayonnaise for their seafood concoctions.
Gateway, normally the most uninhabitable of chains, seems to be genuinely excited about their sandwiches. A small range of American themed packs, a fiercely bargainous Double-Double pack range (four sandwiches), and a competition sandwich (best submitted idea is produced for mass consumption!) are all signs that Gateway are bringing ingenuity back into lunch-time snacks. All the more infuriating then, that they still use the shoddiest limpest bread this side of a blotting paper factory.
Very few chiller cabinets contain any evidence of justice being done to cheese. When will someone learn the correct way to deploy cheddar in a tight enclosure? . Slices warp and sweat far too easily, and the tactile sensation of a rubber edge of cheese can ruin the experience of watching the BBC2 Saturday matinee from the bench outside Radio Rentals. It is for this reason that Tesco’s Cheese and ham triple pack shines like a beacon in the darkness. While their other options are no great shakes, the sheer quality across the bread board (!!!) here boggles the tongue. The bread is a firm multigrained wholemeal, the cheese - mature, grated and combined with just the right amount of mayonnaise to keep it tart, and the ham is wafer-thin and plentiful. What really tips the balance is the third wedge, so when most lunches are over in seconds, this experience lasts. A triumph !
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