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Welcome to Vittles Recipes! This week’s columnist is Nick Bramham. You can read our archive of cookery writing here.
At Quality Wines, this sandwich was so popular the kitchen couldn’t keep up with demand. Here’s how you make it at home.
Although the story goes that sandwiches were invented in eighteenth-century England by a gambling Earl, in reality they’ve existed in some form or another for millennia – at least since the domestication of wheat in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East and possibly even before that (the earliest evidence of bread-making predates the advent of agriculture by several thousand years).
Whatever its origins, in my view the sandwich reached its apogée in the USA in the twentieth century, and like cinema, stand-up comedy, and jazz, became a great cultural export, much mimicked but seldom bettered. There’s a sandwich for nearly every major city: Chicago’s Italian beef, Philadelphia’s cheesesteak, Los Angeles’ French Dip (complete with a century-long feud between two eateries that both claim to have invented it). And in some cases there’s more than one: New York City boasts the chopped cheese and the many wonders of Ashkenazi Jewish delis (pastrami on rye, corned beef, cream cheese and lox bagels), while New Orleans boasts the muffaletta and several varieties of po’ boy.
In case it isn’t already clear, I love sandwiches – thinking about them, making them, eating them – and I often have them on the menu at Quality Wines in some form or another. So, I figured it was about time I provided a recipe for one: the tuna melt, which proved so popular I had to take it off the menu – frying multiple sandwiches to order while executing a full à la carte menu just isn’t possible with our small team and limited set-up. For those of you who have been campaigning for the tuna melt to make a reappearance, offering you the means to make it yourself is the best I can do.
The tuna melt was apparently invented by mistake in the 1960s at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Charleston, South Carolina, when the cook accidentally tipped tuna salad onto a grilled cheese sandwich and served it anyway, much to the surprise and delight of the clientele. A star was born. This story sounds apocryphal, but I can find no sources claiming an alternative origin; unlike the French dip, no one is clamouring to claim it.
Since my wife (and sometime menu-muse) suggested I put a tuna melt on the menu a few years ago, I’ve tested many versions, and have reached what I think is its ultimate expression, with the perfect ratio of tuna to mayo. Of course, others will have thoughts as to why mine is wrong – I’ve learnt that people have very strong opinions when it comes to tuna melts – but here’s how I do it.
