THE GREAT BRITISH SANDWICH

From The Times today (30th Aug)


The great British sandwich and its brief journey from glory to ridicule.

Los Angeles Notebook by Chris Ayres................................

IN HINDSIGHT, I was naive. Stupid, even. I believed I could do what no Englishman had ever done before: make an American woman enjoy my native country's food.

So there I was, my future wife beside me, browsing the refrigerated shelves of a Pret A Manger on our first trip to London together. I could barely contain my excitement: I was, after all, about to prove wrong all those snide American stereotypes about hard mushy peas and cold spam fritters.

Then I caught a glimpse of it: the subject of so many Englishmen's noonday fantasies. I felt winded with expectation ?- like a little boy ready to show off a new Lego set to his best friend. Elbowing a fellow customer out of the way, I made an heroic dive for the last unsold All Day Breakfast sandwich. I held it proudly aloft. I expected this to be the beginning of a transformation: for the rest of the week, Lucie would drag me from pub to pub in search of authentic Spotted Dicks, Yorkshire puddings and sausage rolls.

What kind of person, after all, could not appreciate the genius of a full English breakfast, delivered in a convenient, inexpensive, pre-wrapped sandwich format ?- the rich, lumpy mixture of chopped sausage, scrambled egg, streaky bacon, mayonnaise and cold tomato ketchup, all squished between two slabs of healthy ?- yes, healthy ?- brown bread?

"After this," I boasted, "you'll understand."

The moment that followed will stay with me for life ?- along with the time I realised my Christmas presents did not come from the North Pole on the back of a reindeer-driven sleigh.

Lucie looked at the sandwich. Then she looked at me. Then she said, "Eeugh! That's gross!"

Suddenly, I saw myself, and my small, carbohydrate-loving country, in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable. Worse: I saw the All Day Breakfast sandwich as a Californian might see it ?- a culinary abomination, exposure to which could cause long-term health issues.

I mention all this because I had dinner at the weekend with Ashley James, the dashing 37-year-old Brummie who has just been named executive chef at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. James, a brilliantly unpretentious maestro who can spend as much time raving about a McVitie's chocolate digestive as a Michelin-rated dessert, is bravely planning to make British food a feature on the hotel's restaurant menu.

Given that you can find more A-listers in the Four Seasons' dining room than you can on its pay-per-view movie channel, this is a big deal for our oft-insulted national grub.

"I'm thinking treacle tarts with Weetabix," says James, a former Young Chef of the Year in France, before realising I'm taking notes.

"Noooo! That's a joke!" he cries. "But we are going to have The Ultimate Fish 'n' Chips."

James's problem, I fear, is that "proper" British food has been made obsolete by global warming and the leisure society. In other words, you have to be freezing cold and knackered to enjoy it, unless you've been conditioned by birth, as I have.

But even in Britain, balmy weather and sedentary office jobs are making people think twice about ordering a chip butty with curry sauce. Imagine then the attitude in scorching California, where physical labour is an abstract concept known only to a handful of scholars at Berkeley ?- unless, that is, you're from south of the border. Not, of course, that a Latino would swap a chicken burrito for a steak and kidney pudding when it's 120 degrees under a palm tree.

Fortunately, James's genius is in a different league to that of the Pret A Manger employee who created the All Day Breakfast sandwich. If anyone can make a suet dumpling appealing to a vegetarian starlet on a soy-based macrobiotic diet, then he can.

The best of British, old chap.




IF YOU THINK it's hard to defend English food in California, consider what the Scots have got to work with.
In the old days, expat Scots used to inflict their cooking on the locals only once a year, on Burns Night. Then the Food and Drug Administration intercepted a Beverly Hills-bound consignment of haggis. Alarmed at the lab test results, officials reclassified the beloved dish as fertiliser.

It is now on a list of forbidden imports, along with nerve gas and nuclear weapons.