For any who never had the joy of working in the food service industry, a “sheet tray” or “sheet pan” is a heavy-gauge aluminium rectangle with a high lip and far more uses than simply turning out large, flat cakes, the function for which it was designed. A “full sheet”, at 18 x 26 inches (45 x 66 cm) is rather enormous and unwieldy, but the “half-sheet” is easy enough to handle and indispensable for many kitchen tasks.

The summer following my tenure as Salad Boy I graduated to Head of Food Preparation at the same seafood restaurant on Block Island. This was a good job as restaurant jobs went. I had daily tasks to perform at my own pace within banker’s hours, and I was almost entirely insulated from the frenzy of weekend dinner rushes and unpredictable crises that working on the line inevitably entails. I could enjoy my shift drink at the bar at a decent cocktail hour rather than gulping Long Island Iced Tea from a soggy paper milkshake cup while mucking out the Frialator® at 1.00 am. For these perks I traded beach time, but it was a good job.

I spent my days stocking and portioning. Through the morning I’d be up to my elbows in fresh haddock and sole, portioning it into baking dishes and ladling drawn butter over it before dusting it with paprika to prepare it for cooking. The completed prepped fish, ready for broiling that evening, would go onto half-sheets and be covered with plastic wrap before being refrigerated within easy reach of the broiler (name of both appliance and operator). For the cook assigned to saute I would portion scallops to top linguine, make seafood stuffing for gigantic shrimps, and garlic the holy hell out of scampi. Anything fried, which I also spent long hours portioning out, would leave the kitchen accompanied by a glop of cole slaw dumped from an ice cream scoop onto a bed of lettuce by any of my various replacements in the role of Salad Boy, so in the course of that summer I also created one hell of a lot of cole slaw from endless cases of fresh cabbage. About 16 tons of cole slaw, by my calculations, of which only the smallest fraction was ever consumed.

But this is not the story of cole slaw, or of scampi, nor even of scallops, that most noble of bivalves. This is the story of a sandwich.

I give you the BLT.

I was responsible for opening the kitchen in the morning, before any cooks or salad personnel arrived. The first order of business was a matter of debate; should I T.C.B. or nourish the body with a BLT? Fortunately, the two were not mutually exclusive.

As I write this I cannot recall what it was that called for so much bacon in that kitchen. We did sell an enormous number of burgers, many of which were apparently of the bacon-cheese- variety, but there must have been some other reason I spent the first half hour of every day cooking off half-sheet after half-sheet of bacon in the broiler. The bacon came in a large, flat box (the same size as a half-sheet) on layered waxed paper, about 20 slices per layer. I would cook a few hundred slices of bacon, scooping them out of their own golden grease and layering them up on absorbent paper pie plates until the stack of bacon/pie plate/bacon etc. was in danger of collapsing. Once the bacon-cooking was in train, I would toast some whole wheat bread lightly, and then repair to the walk-in to seek out the nicest-looking head of iceberg lettuce and the ripest tomato in the place.

The BLT is a model of synergy, a perfect example of ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. All of the ingredients in the BLT are humble, but it’s the commingling of them that makes the sandwich, the way the tomato’s juices combine with the grease of the bacon and the mayonnaise, the give of the toast and the crunch of the lettuce, the tang of the tomato and the salt of the pork. In the best BLT each element is sublime, but gives itself over to the whole. The BLT is the chamber music of sandwiches. I ate one every morning of that 16-ton summer and never grew tired of the beautiful marriage of bacon, lettuce, and tomato.

Sometimes I added cheese.

This entry is part of The Sandwich Party

Other sandwiches at the party:
Simon’s chip butty
Ham and macandcheese
Erik’s eggy Spanish goodness

[UPDATE]
That’s as far as I got before lethargy took over, and now it seems unnecessary to link to each sandwich individually when the organizers have already done all that lifting here and here. These ladies know how to throw a party.