Cheese, Bread, Mostarda – the Cheese Sandwich

What is a sandwich, anyway? Two pieces of bread—or can it be three? What kind of bread counts? As the great Pound Cake Facebook Debate of 2015 suggested, for some people cake is not bread, no matter what French monarchs might try to tell us.

All of this is prologue to a confession. I meant to write a post last month about butterbrot (though our leader and international sandwich expert Jim had already done so in splendid fashion). But a trip to Chicago mid-month and an inability to find a sourdough rye slowed me down. I actually ate my butterbrot—heavily buttered rye bread with aged gouda and homemade cherry-apple mostarda—on February 26, but couldn’t find time to write the post till March had rolled around.

But, lucky for me, “cheese sandwich” follows butterbrot in our sandwich list. Unless you don’t consider open-faced sandwiches sandwiches. Then you might just want to skip this post (except don’t because there’s a great recipe for mostarda at the end).

Probably the quintessential cheese sandwich for Americans is the grilled cheese. When I was in Chicago I actually ate a grilled cheese sandwich with soup at Soupbox and what I learned is that I don’t really like grilled cheese sandwiches anymore. I’m sure there’s a way to make sure that the bread isn’t soggy, that butter doesn’t coat your mouth, that you don’t end up feeling like you swallowed a basketball, but this wasn’t it (the soup was good, though). I much prefer my cheese sandwiches unmelted.

Don’t believe the FDA–totally edible. But don’t believe this label. I don’t think this was pure mustard oil.

Like the one above. The bread is from ShopRite, so nothing special, but also totally fine. The butter, too, was grocery-brand. The cheese was a well-aged gouda, which was a bit too dry for my taste, though it had a nice nuttiness. The key to bringing it all together was the mostarda. Mostarda is an Italian condiment, usually used on meats and cheeses, that’s made out of dried or fresh fruits cooked with sugar and water into a chunky syrup that ferments over several days. The kicker is the final addition—mustard oil, which cuts the sweetness with a hint of mustard’s bite. Mustard oil is a staple of Indian cooking, but the FDA won’t import it into the U.S. as food. You can find it in Indian grocery stores (though I’ve learned that often what gets imported is old or cut with other oils).

If you cook and you love yourself, buy one of these. Amazing.

Given that I’d bought a bottle of mustard oil and had my trusty Thermapen, I was ready to tackle mostarda. Wrong. I used the recipe in Marc Vetri’s Rustic Italian Food and it was a disaster. Vetri is an astonishing chef and his first book Il Viaggio di Vetri, is fantastic, but this recipe just didn’t work. The proportion of syrup to fruit—even though I weighed everything—was completely imbalanced. I could’ve added twice as much fruit to the syrup I had. Plus, the recipe didn’t make it clear that the fruit should be cut into a small dice. My apples didn’t fully cook, perhaps because they were too big. I tossed the whole batch.

Back to the internet. A much easier recipe didn’t bother with three days worth of cooking syrup to exact temps and then steeping the fruit in it. It called for cranberries, which I replaced with frozen cherries and an apple. And, you know what? It ended up being pretty tasty and beautiful, especially when I drizzled that ruby syrup over gouda, butter, and bread.

You know it’s good when this is the only bit that’s left.

That, my friends, was one tasty cheese sandwich.

*And if you’re inclined to be a purist, I’d think that some mostarda chopped finely and stirred into mayo or more mustard would make an excellent sandwich spread.

juliachildish

No denying it, I like the sensual things of the world, especially good food and drink, though I’m no snob when it comes to either. A background in American cultural history and food studies makes me approach the world with a desire for contextualization and connection on the way to synthesis.