Sandwich Surimi-Crudités

Break a surimi stick in half and the cross-section is a tight pink-and-white spiral, the orange skin wound around a pale core that is not crab at all. That manufactured stick is what defines this sandwich and sets it apart from every other thing in the cold case. Surimi is a paste of cheap white fish, usually Alaska pollock, washed to a flavourless gel and then bound with starch, sweetener, and a touch of real or synthetic crab flavour before being rolled, coloured, and cut into batons. Shredded or sliced into a split baguette with a load of raw vegetables and a lemony mayonnaise, it is the budget end of the French sandwicherie, the seafood sandwich with no fish in it that you would recognise.

The stick is engineered to fake one thing and it shows. Pollock has almost no flavour once it is washed to surimi. The crab taste is added from a flavouring, not from crab. The pink is painted on one side as a thin coloured skin. The texture is set by starch into a springy, peelable fibre that pulls apart in strands rather than flaking like fish. What goes into the bread is therefore mild to the point of blankness, a soft sweetish protein that brings colour and chew but leaves the seasoning entirely to the dressing and the vegetables around it.

Two faults sink it, and both come from how little the surimi gives. The flavour problem is first: the sticks are so mild and the raw vegetables so watery that without real lemon and salt in the mayonnaise the whole sandwich reads of nothing, a damp blank bite. The water problem is second: surimi carries dressing on its surface rather than soaking it up, and every vegetable in the build sheds liquid, so the loaf floods from the inside unless the cook drains the tomato, blots the cucumber, and binds the mayonnaise tight enough to coat rather than run. A leaf laid against the crumb buys the crust a little time. Stuff the loaf past what it can hold and the soft sticks and wet salad slide out at the first bite.

Lift one cold from the shelf and the crust crackles as you press the loaf in your grip, the filling cool and a touch sweet on the first bite. The surimi peels apart in springy strands with a faint shellfish-flavoured note that is more idea than taste, the grated carrot crunching sweet beside it, the cucumber clean and watery, the tomato releasing a thin sour wash. The mayonnaise pulls it together with a lemon sharpness that is doing most of the actual flavouring. It eats soft and mild and cold, more about texture and chill than any strong taste, and an hour past its best the crunch has gone and the bread underneath has turned damp.

On the sandwicherie board the surimi-crudités sits at the cheap end, the one ordered by the student and the office worker counting coins, written up beside the thon-crudités and the poulet-crudités as the seafood option that costs the least. It is bakery and chain food, sold pre-wrapped as often as made to order, and nobody pretends it is more than it is: a filling lunch built from an industrial stick a supermarket sells in shrink-wrapped packs of twelve. The grammar of the board is price and protein, and this is the line a customer reads when the tuna costs more and the plain ham feels too bare.

The variations move along the dressing and the vegetables. A crème fraîche dressing reads lighter and tangier than mayonnaise against the raw veg; a version heavy on grated carrot pushes toward sweetness and crunch, one heavy on tomato toward juice and a wetter loaf. Thin rings of raw onion bring a sharpness the soft sticks lack. What it is not is a crab sandwich: real picked crab is a separate and far costlier build, and a surimi-and-avocado roll borrowed from sushi counters is a different dish on different bread. The dressed-stick-and-salad baguette is its own honest cheap thing, related to those by ingredient but not by ambition.

Surimi, a Japanese paste on a French baguette

The sandwich has no origin story, but the stick inside it has a sharp one. Surimi as a fish paste is centuries-old Japanese craft, the base of the steamed kamaboko cake, but the crab-flavoured baton is a modern industrial invention: the Japanese firm Sugiyo first produced and patented an imitation crab product, kanikama, in 1974, reportedly after a failed attempt to make artificial jellyfish yielded something with a crab-like texture instead. A stick form followed from the firm Osaki Suisan in 1975.

From there it travelled fast. In 1977 a San Francisco company working with Sugiyo introduced the imitation crab to markets outside Japan, and the cheap, shelf-stable, ready-to-eat stick spread through Western supermarkets over the following decade. France took to it as a low-cost seafood filler, and by the time the chilled sandwich case became standard in French bakeries the surimi baton was an obvious budget protein to drop into a crudités baguette.

What can be dated precisely is the stick, and it is startlingly recent: its seafood is younger than the spaceflight era. The pink-and-white crab baton that names the sandwich did not exist before Sugiyo patented kanikama in 1974, which leaves this French staple, for all its old baguette and older vegetables, built around an ingredient barely fifty years old.