Club Sandwich Indian Style

The veg club starts on a hot tawa, where three slices of sandwich bread are buttered on both faces and toasted until they crackle. The butter smells of browned milk for the minute it sizzles, and the slices snap faintly when pressed. That toast is the frame of the whole stack: two floors of filling need crust that stays rigid when the sandwich is lifted. Green chutney goes on next, ground from coriander, mint, green chilli, garlic and a pinch of amchur, spread in a thin even coat that gives the first bite a sharp, herbal, faintly sour edge before the paneer or the potato registers.

The lower floor is a paneer mixture. Onion, carrot, capsicum and sweet corn are softened in a little oil, then folded with grated paneer, pepper, mixed herbs and tomato sauce into a crumbly, savoury spread that stays warm against the toast above and below it. Grated fine and used warm from the pan, the paneer binds into soft crumbs; left to go cold it firms up and turns rubbery. The sweet corn kernels and strands of carrot show up as small bursts of sweetness when a wedge is bitten through, and the herbs give the mixture a faintly pizza-like savour that the chutney cuts across.

The upper floor is cool and wet: slices of boiled potato, tomato and onion, a cheese slice, a spoon of ketchup. The potato has to be boiled through so it bends without cracking, and the tomato is sliced thin so its juice does not slump the toast. Another build puts cucumber and seasoned paneer slices under grated cheese, then a raw slaw of cabbage, carrot and capsicum bound with mayonnaise and mustard paste, which adds a creamy, crunching layer between two crisp ones. In every version the cool cucumber or tomato lands against warm bread, and that temperature gap is half of the pleasure.

A toothpick through the centre pins the three slices, and a knife cuts the stack into four wedges so each one shows its strata of green, white and red. Steam rises from the cut face of a fresh one. It arrives with a heap of chips and a sachet of ketchup, and the toothpick is the first thing to go because the top slice slides if it stays. Recipes file the club under Indian street food and say it suits breakfast, lunch, dinner or the snack that goes with evening tea, made for four on a griddle in about twenty minutes. Delivery menus in Mumbai's suburbs list it as layers of filling between soft toasted bread.

The stack bends easily to what the kitchen has. A spiced gram-flour besan chilla or a tomato omelette can sit on top, bringing an eggy chew to the third floor. Eggless mayonnaise can replace the chutney when a milder, creamier sandwich is wanted, and a cook with a tin of corn or a leftover capsicum folds it into the paneer without ceremony. Because the whole thing is vegetarian, the chutney and the green chilli supply the sharpness that cured meat would in a Western club, and the heat of the chilli is what lingers after the last wedge.

Origin and history

No record names the cook or the cafe that first spread chutney between club layers. The frame comes from the Western club, traced to the Union Club of New York and its chicken-and-bacon stack on two or three slices; the Indian build keeps the toasted multi-slice shape and fills it with paneer, potato and cheese, which gives a vegetarian kitchen a club of its own.

Mumbai is the city most often attached to it. The veg club is presented as a heat-forward, vegetarian version of the club from Mumbai, and delivery menus in the city's suburbs list it beside the toasted Bombay sandwich, which shares its green chutney and its tawa. The Bombay sandwich itself is credited by some to migrant textile workers in the 1960s.

The printed form is easy to date. By 12 March 2020 the Indian-style veg club was in print as street food, with the chutney on the first two slices, a toothpick through the stack, four wedges and chips alongside. By August 2022 a variant with a mayonnaise-and-mustard slaw and amchur in the chutney had followed, and both versions come hot off the tawa.