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Shooters sandwich
The finished shooter's sandwich. Photograph: Tim Hayward
The finished shooter's sandwich. Photograph: Tim Hayward

The best sandwich ever?

This article is more than 13 years old
What's your favourite sandwich and how precise is the recipe for success?

In pictures: how to make a shooter's sandwich

Like most men I love a sandwich. I like the immediacy and functionality of food shaped to post into the mouth. I love the convenience - I'm happy knocking one up out of the ingredients to hand while I'm working - and I don't care if it is a complete myth that the Earl of Sandwich invented it while gambling. The sandwich could only ever have been dreamed up by a bloke who was insanely hungry and totally preoccupied so the story's so perfect it should be true.

But for me the sandwich is also something altogether more serious. Beyond the convenience the mere scratching together of random ingredients between assorted breads, there has evolved a canon of great sandwiches; mighty works as fully formed and set in stone as anything Escoffier ever laid down.

Some are simple. The BLT requires no more than obedience to the basic formula for success. Once you know that the bread must be toasted packet white, the bacon smoked, the lettuce Iceberg, the tomato beefsteak and the mayo Hellmann's then even the most hopeless tyro can't go wrong. It's identical in every roadside diner across the States, a platonic ideal that need never be messed with.

The BLT's cousin, on the other hand, the Club Sandwich, is like 12 bar blues - a guiding framework for extemporisation. A staple of room service, it tends to be elaborated by the kitchen. A merely adding chicken to a BLT will form a basic Club … but then it can be gilded with sliced hard boiled egg, three layers of house-made sourdough and a lemon mayo whipped up by the chef himself. The BLT is an absolute, the Club a blank sheet.

Some sandwiches are all about scale. The sandwiches at Katz's or the Carnegie Deli in New York, contain over a pound of assorted charcuterie and constitute an active rebuttal of years of oppression and deprivation. The oyster 'po'boy' of New Orleans, a roll crammed with fried oysters, cocking a triumphant snook at poverty with its huge scale and its very name. The Philly cheese steak, a combination of cheap industrial cheese, cheap industrial steak, onions and a roll that strains to contain it, like the casing on a cholesterol torpedo, could be the truest expression of the American dream of easy plenty for all.

The French by contrast, notoriously fail to understand the sandwich at all. In spite of producing some of the world's most excellent bread, a request for 'un sandwich' will produce a single slice of cheese or ham in a piece of dry baguette. In the more cosmopolitan port cities of the south though, it's possible to obtain a pan bagnat. One can easily imagine a betoqued chef, asked by a wind-dried son-of-the-sea to produce something that could be consumed while mending nets on a rocking boat. Shrugging expressively he slaps a large helping of salad Nicoise into an oil soaked bun. This is the sandwich as delivery system. One could say the same of the many variations of the fried-breakfast-in-a-bap offered by greasy spoons around the UK (my personal favourite is served at Brighton's Market Diner).

Finally we have the destination sandwich, a construction that food lovers will travel miles to enjoy. For the grand tourist there is the lampredotto, a roll containing boiled tripe served in the Mercado Centrale in Florence but in our own capital food lovers in the know have begun flocking to the arepa stall at Camden Market, the banh mi stand at Broadway Market and Tsuru Sushi (about to open a new branch in the City) for the legendary katsu sandwich.

Could I select a favourite? Yes, but it's none of these. My best sandwich combines all of these characteristics and remains resolutely and authentically British. A triumph of Edwardian cuisine, the shooter's sandwich was originally created as a snack that Cook could make the night before it was required, effectively making a beef Wellington portable so a gentleman needn't get peckish while hunting. There's a slideshow detailing the construction process here.

1. You'll need your choice of crusty loaf, a couple of good steaks - I used rib-eyes - roughly the same shape in plan as the loaf plus 500g of mushrooms and 200g of shallots.

2. Slice off the top quarter of the loaf, hook out most of the crumb and save for breadcrumbs.

3. Cut your shallots and mushrooms into fine dice and put about 75g of butter into the pan. Other fats will do. I got lucky, Allegra McEvedy had used my kitchen for a shoot the week before and had left just the right quantity of beef bone marrow in the fridge.

4. Cook mushrooms and shallots fiercely in the butter, stirring continuously, until they've softened, reduced in size and lost a substantial amount of moisture. This is the classic 'duxelles' mixture used in a beef Wellington. Some have suggested that whole portabella mushrooms and sliced onions could be substituted but that feels like a vegetarian option to me and somehow undermines the whole point.

5. Once sufficiently cooked down the mushrooms will absorb flavour like a sponge. I used plenty of salt and black pepper, some finely grated garlic a shot of brandy and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. Those fearing scurvy might add some chopped parsley too.

6. Season your steaks and bring them to the pink side of medium in a searing hot dry pan. Don't bother resting them. Work fast and tuck the first one, dripping and hot, straight into the bottom of the hollow loaf. It doesn't matter if the juices leak now - in fact it just makes the whole thing more sublime.

7. Dollop in your hot mushroom mixture and tuck your second steak over the top. At this stage I usually smear hot horseradish on the top steak and Dijon mustard on the inside of the lid before fitting it back on to the loaf.

8. Wrap the whole thing in greaseproof paper and tie with butcher's string, then wrap in two layers of foil and smush flat under a heavy cutting board and as many weights as you can find. Leave under the weights in a reasonably cool place (don't refrigerate) for at least six hours or preferably overnight. Remove the foil and cut through string, paper and sandwich.

10. Serve sliced like cake accompanied by something vaguely vegetable-based to assuage the guilt; possibly a Bloody Mary.

I think the shooter is my ultimate sandwich on grounds of excess, tradition and general splendour - I'm certainly going to keep testing until I'm sure. But tell me, what are we missing from the canon of sandwich greats, what's your favourite, and how precise is the recipe for success?

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