Roast Chicken and Mayonnaise

This is the plain one, the unspiced floor the rest of the bound-chicken family is built on top of. Cold roast chicken torn into mayonnaise, seasoned, maybe a thread of celery or cress through it, on soft white or brown. Its near twin, roast chicken and bacon, adds a salty, crisp second protein and gets most of the glory in the chiller cabinet; the curried, apricot-sweet version becomes coronation chicken. Strip both of those away and what is left, chicken and mayonnaise and not much else, is the version a tooth meets most often in Britain, because it is the one the supermarket triangle defaults to.

The mayonnaise is doing structural work, not sitting on top as a condiment. Cold roast chicken is mild and faintly dry, the fat and moisture having stayed on the carcass when the bird cooled, and the mayonnaise gives that fat back and turns a loose handful of torn meat into one cohesive thing that spreads corner to corner and holds under bread. Torn rather than sliced thin, so the ragged edges catch the dressing; seasoned through, because unsalted cold bird and plain mayonnaise add up to very little; that is more or less the whole recipe, which is exactly why the filling lives or dies on the chicken under it.

That chicken is, by tonnage, the single most-bought sandwich ingredient in the country. The British Sandwich Association puts the trade's chicken habit at around forty-three thousand tonnes a year, well ahead of any other filling, and a large share of it ends up bound in mayonnaise. Whether plain chicken-mayo or the bacon version literally tops the bestseller polls shifts from survey to survey, and the bacon one usually wins the headline; that chicken leads the whole trade by sheer weight does not. The plain bound triangle is where a lot of that weight quietly goes, one undramatic lunch at a time.

There is barely a smell to it until the first bite, low and mild, cold poultry under the faint eggy sweetness of the mayonnaise. The bread gives at once, the filling is cool and soft against the roof of the mouth, the torn chicken yielding rather than resisting, the dressing slick and lightly rich. Where celery or onion has gone in there is a small wet snap that breaks the softness. It is comforting and a little bland by design, the desk lunch eaten without much thought, and the seasoning is most of the margin between a good one and one you forget while you are still chewing it.

Its single most famous descendant can be dated to the afternoon of 2 June 1953. For the coronation luncheon of Queen Elizabeth II, two cooks at the London Cordon Bleu school, Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume, dressed cold chicken in a mayonnaise-based curry-cream sauce sweetened with apricot puree, a dish they called Poulet Reine Elizabeth and everyone else has called coronation chicken ever since. Hume is generally given the credit for the recipe. It is the plain bound-chicken sandwich with curry powder and fruit folded in, which makes the ordinary lunchbox triangle, improbably, the everyday relative of a dish composed for a queen.

From the Sunday bird to the lunchtime shelf

The sandwich began as thrift rather than a recipe, the cold remains of a Sunday roast carved down and put between bread for Monday. For most of British history that was an occasional pleasure, because a whole roasting chicken was expensive enough to be a treat: in 1950 chicken was under one per cent of the meat Britons ate, with only around a million birds sold in the entire country that year. What changed the sandwich was what changed the bird. Feed rationing ended in 1953, American broiler stock arrived from 1956, and by the mid-1960s poultry had fallen by roughly a third in price while sales climbed past a hundred and fifty million birds a year.

The expensive Sunday roast had become the cheapest everyday meat on the shelf, and the leftover round followed it from rare to constant. The same bird that was a luxury at the start of the decade was, within little more than a decade of the end of feed rationing, cheap enough to shred into a jar of mayonnaise without a second thought.

The format that carries it now is younger than the cheap chicken that fills it. Boots ran the first recognisable British meal deal as a trial on 6 October 1999, sixteen stores, a sandwich and a snack and a drink for two pounds fifty, and the supermarkets piled in within a few years. Something north of seven million of them sell on a British weekday now, and the bound-chicken triangle holds the front of the chiller through all of them, a Sunday-roast leftover that no longer needs a Sunday roast behind it.