Go for the gold: Welcome to Sandwich City

View in Browser

Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book.

Andrew Scrivani for The New York Times

Monday, July 6, 2020

Welcome to Sandwich City

Sam Sifton

Good morning. Craig Claiborne put red bell pepper in his tuna salad sandwiches, and called for homemade mayonnaise to bind the ingredients. I do neither, preferring scallions, hot sauce and jarred mayonnaise of the sort called Hellmann’s east of the Rockies, and Best Foods to the west. You might add curry powder, or white balsamic vinegar, or grated carrots. You might waffle the sandwich with cheese, for a pockmarked tuna melt. You might add dill.

But you ought to make a tuna salad sandwich at some point this week, particularly if you haven’t had one in a while, to welcome what now officially feels like summer and to celebrate this particularly American lunch dish in whatever way you please.

It needn’t be Claiborne’s recipe. If you’ve never tried the tuna club sandwich they used to serve at the old Union Square Cafe in New York, Julia Reed’s recipe (above) will bring you close to the experience, even if you deploy canned tuna in place of the fresh-poached yellowfin the restaurant used. Or you can follow your own recipe, of course, sharpened through the years. I’ve been playing this game a while and have yet to see anyone make tuna salad the same way as anyone else. That’s great.

Alternatively, you loathe tuna salad and wouldn’t eat any if you were paid, you could page through my “Field Guide to the American Sandwich,” see if there’s a Dagwood out there just for you. Sandwiches for lunch all week, please!

Then for dinner? I might consider this summer shrimp scampi with tomatoes and corn. Or, if rain comes through and with it a little chill in the air, this one-pan vegetable hash with goat cheese and eggs.

One night for sure I’d like to make bhatti da murgh, an Indian grilled chicken from the brilliant Chintan Pandya of Adda Indian Canteen in Queens, adapted by Melissa Clark, spicy and aromatic, with a terrific crunch to the skin. It’s a restaurant recipe, so, of course, you brush the bird with a lot of melted butter at the end. That makes it insanely delicious.

Heat wave? Ice-cold schav to the rescue, courtesy of Gabrielle Hamilton.

And maybe, one evening, just a huge platter of the tempura-fried green beans with mustard dipping sauce that Jimmy Bradley used to serve at the Red Cat, when the Red Cat was open and there were few better things to do than eat tempura-fried green beans at the bar, drinking a martini in the din.

Tofu scramble? Creamy braised white beans? Beef suya? A peanut-butter pie?

There are thousands and thousands more recipes waiting for you on NYT Cooking. I hope you will think about subscribing, if you haven’t already, so that you can see and use all of them. Your subscription is important. It allows us to continue to do this work that we love.

We are here to help if anything goes wrong along the way, either with your cooking or our technology. Simply write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it has nothing to do with frappés or iced coffee, and it’s a hard story to stomach, but Greg Jaffe’s “The Cursed Platoon,” in The Washington Post, is still a must-read.

I’m very late to it but stoked because there are five seasons to watch: the thus-far pretty great French thriller series, “The Bureau,” on Sundance Now.

The director Peter Ramsey has a lovely essay in The Times about his childhood love of drive-in movies, with remarkable archival photographs to accompany it.

Finally, let’s have Experience Unlimited play us off, “Freeze,” from 1985. Play that loud and I’ll be back on Wednesday.