At a glance
- Bread: Soft sliced white, crusts often trimmed for small hands
- Filling: Dairylea Cheese Spread, scraped from a plastic tub
- Butter: Left out, since the spread brings its own fat
- Flavours: Plain, or Bacon and Onion tubs (mid-1990s)
- Served: Cold, cut in triangles or fingers
- Brand dates: Dairylea in England from 1950; the spread from the 1980s
A table knife goes into the tub and comes back with a dense, pale curl that keeps the shape of the blade. It smells of warm milk and a little salt, and it spreads in two strokes across a slice of white bread without lifting a crumb. The knife has to run all the way to the crust line, because a corner left bare turns dry and curls by lunchtime. The top slice goes on and one flat palm presses it down. The Dairylea sandwich is cut into triangles, which suits a spread whose most familiar shape is a foil wedge in a round box.
By noon the sandwich has changed. Left in a bag since breakfast, the bread has taken up a cool dampness from the cheese and gone pliable, and it peels apart in the hand with a faint tack. The first bite is salty, mild and slightly sweet, and the spread sticks to the palate for a moment after the bread has gone. Because the spread is smooth all the way through, each bite tastes the same as the last, and a child can eat half a round without finding a lump, a rind or a seed. That evenness is what the tub is for.
The brand talked to children for decades. Television adverts ran the lines "Kids will eat it until the cows come home" and "Kids will do anything for the taste of Dairylea", and the sandwich it sold was always the simplest one: soft bread, the tub, a knife. Adults make it for the same reason they always have, which is that there are five minutes before the school run and one hand free. A cucumber slice or two goes in for crunch, a curl of ham for a heavier lunch, and tomato gets left out because it wets the bread within the hour.
Bacon and Onion changed the tub in the mid-1990s. The flavoured spread keeps the same pale paste and the same salty cling on the tongue, and on white bread it adds a savoury note of smoke and onion that makes a one-ingredient sandwich taste like it has two. The assembly is unchanged: a scrape to the crust, a press with the palm, a cut into triangles. The plain tub stays in the fridge door beside it for the sandwiches that want nothing added.
Today the chilled shelves of the big supermarkets list the spread in a small 145g tub and a 270g tub, and the larger one is the kind that lasts a household through a week of packed lunches. The lid snaps shut over a surface the knife has scored into ridges, and a tub in regular use is rarely smooth for long. Those ridges are the sign of a sandwich being made often: one scrape for a school lunch, one for a Sunday tea plate beside egg and cress, one at the worktop by an adult with the kettle on.
The Tub Arrives in the 1980s
Dairylea Cheese Spread joined the Dairylea range in the 1980s as the brand's first official spreadable cheese, three decades after the triangles reached England in a round box in 1950. A tub on the table put a knife in the cook's hand and a spread thick enough to cover a whole round of bread. In 1987 the brand moved to a new recipe made without preservatives, and the tub kept its place in the fridge door through the years that followed.
No record names who first spread it onto bread; the sandwich arrived in kitchens as the tub did, and Dairylea's own range of triangles, slices, spread and lunch kits grew up around it. The foil-wrapped slices of 1965 had already been launched on the promise that sandwiches "would never be the same again", and the spread gave the same brand a filling that went on with a knife.
By the mid-1990s the tub came in Bacon and Onion as well as plain, and that savoury tub is the last dated step in the sandwich's own story.