Ham and Cheese

Ham and cheese is two cured things that hold each other up. The ham is salted and the cheese is aged, and each carries a depth the other answers, so the pairing stays interesting on plain bread with no help from heat or sauce. That self-balancing logic is why it survives stripped to its parts. A British ham and cheese leans on it without ornament: a few folds of cold cooked ham, a slice or two of cheddar, soft white bread spread to the corners with butter. Mustard or a spoon of pickle sharpens it, lettuce sometimes rides along, and it is cut on the diagonal and wrapped. Nothing in it is engineered to impress, and that plainness is deliberate.

The pairing works because the two halves were built to last and built to be strong. Cooked ham gives salt and a faint smoke; a mature cheddar gives a tang and a crumble that meets that salt and pushes back. Neither needs the other warmed to read. Put them cold between buttered bread and the flavours arrive in turn rather than blurring, the ham first, then the slow sour edge of the cheese behind it. That sequence is all of it, and it is enough because each ingredient earns its place. There is no garnish to lean on and no sauce doing structural work, so a thin or rubbery slice of either half shows at once.

The British version has a settled grammar, and it is not the American one. The cheese is cheddar far more often than anything mild and melting, sharp enough to be tasted through the bread. The dress is mustard, often English and fierce, or a spoonful of Branston pickle, the dark malty chutney that turns plain cheese into cheese-and-pickle. The bread is soft sliced white from a packet, or a buttered roll or bap from a caff counter. Its home ground is the corner cafe and the supermarket chiller: a cheese-and-ham on white is a fixture of the lunchtime meal deal, made by the million and sold next to the crisps and the can of drink.

Its plated cousin is the ploughman's, and the family resemblance is exact. A ploughman's lunch sets out the same cast unbound, a wedge of cheddar, cold ham or a slice of pork pie, crusty bread, butter, and a heap of Branston with pickled onions and a bit of salad. The sandwich is that plate folded shut and made portable, the cheese and pickle and ham pressed between the bread instead of arranged beside it. Order a ploughman's sandwich in a pub and you get precisely that, the wholegrain mustard and the chutney and the mature cheddar loaded together, the open lunch closed into one hand.

Unwrap one at a desk and it is cool and a little pressed from the chiller, the bread soft under a thumb, a thin smell of ham and sharp cheese coming up. The first bite brings the soft give of buttered white, the ham's salt, then the cheddar arriving sour and dry behind it, and the pickle landing dark and sweet at the end. It does not steam or pull strings. Each part is tasted in turn because nothing is layered over it, and it is finished in a few unhurried bites with clean hands. A poll of British workers had cheese sandwiches and ham among the most-bought meal-deal fillings, which is to say most of the country has eaten this exact thing standing up.

The variations are each one deliberate change to a fixed frame. Toast it in a buttered pan until the cheddar runs and it becomes a hot ham-and-cheese toastie, a different thing with a crust. The French croque-monsieur loads the same ham and cheese, lays béchamel over the top, and bakes it. The loaded roll piles the identical filling onto a long bap and lets the dress carry it. The plain cold version is the quiet parent of all of them, asking the bread to do nothing but hold while the ham and the cheese do the work.

The Baseline Sandwich

No one invented the ham and cheese and no year fixes it. Bread folded around meat and cheese runs further back than anything written down about it, and the pairing is too plain and too old to belong to a person. What is datable is the named handheld around it. The first written use of the word comes from the diary of the historian Edward Gibbon, who on 24 November 1762 described fashionable men in a London coffee-room supping on a bit of cold meat or a sandwich. The famous tale that John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, called for bread and filling at the gambling table is record against legend: it first appears in Pierre-Jean Grosley's gossipy travel book in the early 1770s, told as history a decade after the supposed night, so by the time it was written down it was already a story.

The hot ancestor is better dated than the cold staple. The croque-monsieur is said to have appeared on a Paris cafe menu on the Boulevard des Capucines around 1910, though that origin is the popular version; the firm record is the word in print, which Marcel Proust used in his 1919 novel À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. The British cold sandwich left fewer footprints, because it was too ordinary to write about. Its furnishings can be dated even if the sandwich cannot: Branston pickle, the chutney that made cheese-and-pickle a national habit, was first produced by Crosse & Blackwell in 1922 and named for the Staffordshire village.

The modern era is the meal deal, and that has a precise birthday. Boots the chemist had run systemised sandwich production since 1985, and in 1999 it bundled a sandwich, a snack and one drink for £2.50 in a trial of sixteen shops. The format spread to every supermarket within a few years and turned the cheese-and-ham on white into infrastructure. More than seven million meal deals now sell across Britain on a single weekday, which means the plainest sandwich in the country is also, by volume, close to the most eaten.