Festive Musings: The Leftover Sandwich

The time between Christmas and New Year: limbo, no-man’s land, the in-between… we have heard all of these – honestly, contrite – names before. It is not unusual to feel confused, adrift, or at a loss in the days starting the 26^thof December and ending the 1^stof January. And the media encourages it. Watching another film? Shame on you. NOT watched this film?! You’ve been on your phone for a year and you missed this? Never has that paradox been truer than in 2020. This topsy-turvy, upside down and frankly fucked-up year cannot close soon enough. Personally, it has been a strange end to the year: for the first time in my life I have not seen my family for Christmas, and never mind that, have not seen them in the same room for months. And I have feelings about it. Feelings of bitterness, anger, and even a touch of jealousy – the four of them saw the change of seasons together, and suddenly my decision to choose a life further away from the family home seems costly. But I am under no illusion that these problems are but a shallow scrape on the deeply frozen pond that has been the hurt of 2020. I have been very lucky, so far. My family and friends are healthy, and I could not ask for more than that. Like everyone, Covid has touched the people I love with a worrying intimacy. But so far, no casualties (touch wood). As the winter unfolds and the situation worsens I thank all of my blessings, every day, that this is the case. And I do not take it for granted.

What these reflections are concerned with, however, is not the horror we have all gone through this year. God knows we consume enough about that every day. I am instead reading far too much into an old and steadfast friend who I feel can offer us a lot of comfort right now. After all, this has been a year of Christmas Dinners like no other. Dinners snatched with loved ones at opposite ends of the normally crowded table, eaten in freezing-cold gardens, cooked with partners for the first time (to varying success – who forgot to turn the oven on?), eaten with friends, savoured alone, ignored in sadness. Regardless of plans that were influenced by families/government/work/scheduling/Brexit/Covid… the pressures of Christmas Dinner have in many ways been amplified this year. If we couldn’t be with our mums, how could we compete? If we didn’t want to be with our family, how did we make it clear why? A million difficult questions normally govern this most holy time of year, and 2020 added an unwanted layer of pressure to the already over-burdened trifle of the holiday, in spite of the additional care we all needed to take. But there is one idea we can all relate to in some way at this time of year: the leftover sandwich.

This has been the first year I’ve really been aware of the surprisingly lengthy number of nights that stretch between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve, and the juggling of foods that happens between them. The duck is out of date on this day, but you made the bread sauce two days ahead. The gravy is finished so you can’t make that dish, but there is still an ice-cream tub of red cabbage lingering in the fridge without a use… It goes on, and a culinary calendar maps its way onto your brain.  It is an alchemical kind of wisdom that subliminally navigates these things, knowing what to use when, earmarking that cheese for that dish, and so on. I learned it from my Mum, though I am fully aware I still regularly annoy her on WhatsApp with inane questions about temperatures and textures and timings. And everything goes to hell if an unwitting brother eats the cold ham that was singled out for the soup, unbeknownst to him of course.  

There are few, if any, rules to govern a sandwich though. First of all, you can make the periphery of it with whatever you have. Stale bread, sourdough, a bap, a bagel, a wrap, genuinely… whatever. You need something to create a staunch, carbohydrate-thick border. The next thing of importance is the protein, but again, the laws that govern this are loose. Traditionally, you’d think turkey – cold slices, thickly cut. But in this day and age we eat everything at Christmas: beef, goose, duck, pigs in blankets, chicken, ham. It clucks, it sings, it dances? Put it in a sandwich. And of course, for the non-meat eaters, there are frankly the best bits. Cheese, nut roast, parsnips soaked in gravy, vegetarian sausages…  A hard-boiled egg is a vessel for greatness! When you’re not standing in for protein you have the roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, sprouts, and bread sauce. All excellent things. And the condiments are equally as flexible: sinus-tingling mustard, cranberry sauce, mayonnaise, butter, that weird chutney that has been on the top shelf of the fridge for three years, even (though I shudder to write it) ketchup. These are all acceptable in whatever iteration comes to hand.

The best thing about the leftover sandwich though, it that is a leveller. You put anything between two slices of carbohydrate? It looks roughly the same: chips, chicken, cheese. Of course, there will always be people on Instagram who create sandwiches that are things of beauty, with butter-fried fresh bread and fillings that look better than your actual Christmas dinner. But at this particular time of year the leftover sandwich offers us a certain type and time of freedom. All of the scheduling, preparation, and frantic shopping that must happen to get Christmas dinner on the table (not to mention the cooking, which can be equal parts fun and incredibly stressful) fall away when you’re consulting the possibilities of leftovers. Making a leftover sandwich isn’t cooking, it’s rearranging. There is an innate satisfaction that comes from peacefully turning the spoils of your previous hard work into something that is just for you to enjoy. Is it too much to say a sandwich can be redeeming? Perhaps, but eating it alone in the kitchen certainly has that air about it. In this sandwich format, we can combine anything we want without questioning, criticism or judgment. It doesn’t matter if it’s boxing day or the 31^stof December. The leftover sandwich can be a fresh reimagining of Christmas dinner, or it can be a vessel for the dregs of the fridge, five days on. Either way, encased in a fresh baguette, soaked in gravy-drenched stale white bread or consisting of fridge-raided oddities stuffed into the last roll in the house, the leftover sandwich is a brilliant reminder to all of us that as 2020 comes to a close, we can all reimagine and repurpose happiness in simple, enduring, and hopefully tasty ways. 

Lindsay