Sandwich

 

After church last Sunday at Camberwell, we went over to Mother’s for lunch. This was not going to be “lavish” as she had “a hundred things to do” and lunch would be sandwiches. The large tray that arrived at the table was lavish with the following neatly cut white rows: chicken and fine sliced avocado sandwiches; egg, lettuce and mayonnaise sandwiches, the egg not whizzed to a froth but chopped to keep the flavours. In this way we covered all bases in conversation as the rows gradually disappeared, helped by top-ups of mineral water. Thus restored, we got away soon enough to the hundred things that comprise Sunday afternoon. Sometimes when I look at a lunchbox it reminds me of primary school, the variations of sandwich from one week to the next that our mother produced without comment: crumpled Vegemite sandwiches, sometimes squared with a precise slice of cheddar; tomato sandwiches 10% soggy; ham and sweet mustard pickle sandwiches. The memory required to ring the changes for four ravenous children only later came to be seen as a thing of wonder and a joy forever. Once we went with Mother and Aunt Marjorie to see a children’s matinee in Collins Street; maybe it was Danny Kaye at the Regent. While we had ice-creams, Marjorie ordered an Open Danish. This was the most sophisticated thing we had seen all day, a sandwich constructed upon only one slice of rye, loaded with sumptuous sprawl. Marjorie would order shandies from the bar, an exotic accompaniment completely outside our orbit. Sweet beer was registered as a fact in the childhood mind, but when is a sandwich not a sandwich? Simply by asking we displayed the Englishness of our upbringing, never mind we had never been to England. The Australian talent for reducing long words to short words had yet to invent sanger. This was before the days of panini, tramezzino, focaccia and all the subsequent sandwich surprises that knelled the last of England for slips of skips like us. That said, England continues to be a default setting. We ordinarily expect at the vicarage garden party to be offered cucumber sandwiches, an expectation usually dashed by empirical observation: a singed sausage with BBQ sauce in a Tip Top crust. Lining up for my lunch order at the local Milk Bar (see also Convenience Store) I marvel at how they make a salad sandwich to hold together at a ratio of 5:1 salad:bread. The jambon has not caught on. We read how a Boston court case found that burritos, tacos and quesadillas are not sandwiches, being made from only one tortilla, not two. Aunt Marjorie would have thought this “stuff and nonsense”, and anyway, can a sandwich not have as many slices of bread as needed? ‘Hans Christian Andersen’ – yes, that would have been it!