I think any regional variant should use something similar, rather than simply a pickled vegetable. In the case of Branston pickle, it’s a mix of pickled vegetables in a sauce. What are the parts of a cheese and pickle sandwich? There’s the cheese and bread, pretty straightforward.

The pimentos are sold in jars of brine–isn’t pimento cheese essentially both cheese and pickle in the same package? Why is the cheese and pickle sandwich so British, when–as discussed earlier in the article–pickles are so universal, and so many cultures have their own variations on bread and cheese as well? I thought about Thom’s excellent post on pimento cheese from a few weeks ago. It’s a pretty simple sandwich, without much variation, and so British it makes my teeth hurt.īut the very Britishness of the sandwich did give me an idea. I asked a few more British friends about cheese and pickle sandwiches and didn’t get much in the way of new information or suggestions. Not because of the bread–my baking has gotten quite good–but because I was burning myself out on Branston Pickle much too quickly for the good of this post.įirst I made an Irish brown bread from a recipe that I found on the James Beard Foundation’s website.īranston pickle and sharp Wisconsin cheddar on buttered bloomer bread Then I decided to bake some better bread, and that’s when the problem started. I don’t think you’re normally supposed to toast the bread, but I think this sandwich really requires something a bit more robust than squishy supermarket bread, so I toasted it to make it stand up to the aggressive ingredients better. I had several sandwiches on toasted slices of the simple oat bran bread that’s my go-to from the supermarket and loved them. Once I got over the shock of brown sauce–fucking BROWN SAUCE?–when I was expecting chutney, Branston Pickle turned out to be quite good. Brits and other purists will tell you that you need to use British cheddar for this sandwich, but I live within an hour’s drive of one of the great cheese-producing areas of the world and this is an excellent cheddar.Īnd I actually developed a taste for the sandwich at first. I picked up a nice big hunk of a sharp cheddar in Wisconsin a few weeks ago specifically for these sandwiches.

Encountering it when I was expecting something a little more South Asian-inflected was, well, disappointing.

I’ve gotten to the point where I actually enjoy it, once in a while, in certain circumstances. Now I’ve had a love/hate relationship with British sandwiches for a while, and much of both the love and the hate has been tied up with my reaction to brown sauce. So I was excited to try Branston pickle, and I ordered a jar from Amazon well before it was time for me to start working with this sandwich. What “jarred pickled chutney” doesn’t tell you is that Branston Pickle actually consists of various pickled vegetables–carrots, onions, cauliflower, gherkins, rutabaga–in brown sauce. In my experience, British chutneys have tended more toward the sweet and fruity, but have been tasty, and recognizably derived from their more traditional Indian counterparts. a jarred chutney made from a variety of pickled vegetables.” Chutneys are a diverse group of condiments associated with the Indian subcontinent, and of course British culture absorbed and put its own spin on a lot of Indian cuisine during their colonial period. Branston pickle is sometimes described as a “jarred pickled chutney” or a “spiced vegetable mixture” or “one of the greatest condiments…. The “pickle” in cheese and pickle sandwiches, though, refers to a pretty specific type of pickle. Various types of vegetables, fruits, nuts, even eggs, fish, meats, and cheeses are pickled in different cultures around the world in Europe, Asia, North and South America, the Middle East, and Africa. Wherever there are people and an unstable or seasonal food supply, food preservation becomes an issue, and pickling is one of the primary methods by which food is preserved. This is done either by an anaerobic fermentation (mostly lactic fermentation, which creates lactic acid as a byproduct) or by storing the food in an acid solution, such as vinegar, salt, sugar, water and spices.

Pickling is the process of preserving food by creating an acidic environment to prevent, or seriously delay, the decomposition of the food by microorganisms. Slices or spears of pickled cucumbers may be what I think of when I hear “pickle,” but all over the world, different cultures make different types of pickles. I’ll just get some American cheese, some pickle chips, and some supermarket bread, and… Not a combination I’d have thought of, but sure.

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