Relish

I don't quite know how to put this, but my life was changed yesterday, by a sandwich. My good friend Rick Fox served me a fried bologna sandwich - a piece of his childhood, a family tradition, his mother made them, etc. - and as I told him shortly after taking the first bite, I've never had anything better. It had the hallmark of cuisine: you take a couple of things, put them together, and they become something else. You do this as simply as possible. A fried bologna sandwich meets every criteria. It is the definition of a dish. The recipe is below.

This came hard on the heels of a few other things. Current sandwich voguishness. Mark Bittman, the food writer, with a big piece in May's Men's Health on the sandwich as a kind of quintessential cooking tool for men. An on-the-plate version of the standard men's magazine be-good-in-bed, she'll-toss-herself-like-a-salad-if-you-try-this type story. They usually involve 'listening' and 'foreplay,' two things men will never - ever - be interested in, not even the ones who spend big money on clothes. Lots of photos of sandwiches lined up, like a dress-for-success shoes feature. There's a sushi sandwich; there's a roast pork sandwich ... zzzzz.

Sandwich cookbooks, spilling out of the gate. The chef Tom Colicchio's "wichcraft," and others. 'Craft a sandwich into a meal - and a meal into a sandwich.' Tom's got a yellow beets with avocado, grapefruit, and radish sprouts sandwich. Boy am I going to make a lot of money with bologna. Please keep reading.

Brooklyn. Don't get me started. If you have been reading the New York Times Dining section recently, or New York magazine, the blogs and others, you now understand, as their editors do, that people in Brooklyn - young people - invented food. Somewhere in an emerging neighborhood somewhere. Sometime in the last couple of years, months, whatever. Cobble Gardens, Park Hook, Prospect Hill, Red Heights. Pickle-makers and chocolate-crafters and coffee-negociants and pizza-preneurs and bakers, bakers, bakers. Handeverythinged, homemaded, PCed and recycled, local, handsomely packaged, premium-priced, and all with an entrepreneurial sincerity that puts a thumbs-forward chokehold on you before you get a chance to swallow a sample of the ****ing product. It's like they've stumbled off-line into the third dimension, where everything is new: soap, knives, meat, bottles with labels. It's 'The Whole Earth Catalogue,' all over again.

The big killing fields for this, I discovered on Saturday, is the Brooklyn flea market in Fort Greene, or the 'Brooklyn Flea.' (hey, it wouldn't be Brooklyn if it wasn't twee.) I went there to check out the possibility of selling my earthly goods - like the chair I'm sitting in as I post - to bring some money in, in the face of continuing unemployment. Somehow I don't think I'm going to recoup the money I spent at the armories over the years in a schoolyard, though Lucky magazine was there on Saturday, photographing away with a bizillion dollar camera that had the hipsters in a cold faint. Guy Trebay of the New York Times walked by, narrow nose to the wet wind, in a perfect short raincoat, his Guy-ger counter set on high.

But the main event was the food people. Did you know food was invented in Brooklyn? Sandwiched - sorry - between the rag pickers and the schlock crockery, the gay jewelry designers and the Guatemalan hightop sneakers were the artisans of eating, the iPaesans of Cobble Hill/Carroll Gardens/Prospect Park. Ten dollar gherkins, three dollar slivered salami, it-takes-a-village-to-market-a-cup-of-coffee beans in we-are-the-world bags, designed on Dreamweaver. And people lining up like the homeless at a soup kitchen, crisp ATM twentys in hand, like government coupons, for Gowanus Canal Gourmet Garage-band. In fairness, they looked homeless, from the neck down; all the four-figure eyewear was above.

Why am I upset? Who knows. Do I want a piece of this? Yes. I now have my weapon.

Enter the fried bologna sandwich. Authentic. Insulting. Enjoyable. Invincible. A Trojan Pig. (by-products.) How to invade and affront the Brooklyn food world simultaneously, at the Flea? Put down my money and start slicing up the market. Look for me there soon.

Serves one, to stupefication:

You need a Portuguese sandwich roll, from the supermarket. Eight slices of bologna. A few slices of Swiss cheese, and mayonnaise from a jar.

Fry six bologna slices in a skillet with a little olive oil or butter. When it's gotten kind of unctuous and oily and floppy, greasy and wet and grilled, but not browned, crisped or dry, stack it on the side of the skillet, with slices of Swiss cheese between each two slices of bologna, and fry the remaining two slices of bologna. Toast the Portuguese roll, sliced in half, cut side up, in a Toaster Oven until it's warm and soft, remove and spread mayonnaise on it, put a slice of frying bologna on one half of it, then the stack of bologna and cheese on top, then the remaining bologna slice on top of that. Put the top of the roll on top of that, and eat the sandwich right away.

Serving suggestions, strongly suggested. TCT's test kitchen found that high-quality flavored potato chips - the ones that you've never let yourself buy, because they sound disgusting, or you're confident they taste bad, or nothing like what they say they taste like, or you're sure they're full of chemicals, or you're afraid your children will get hold of them and ruin all your good work, or you're worried you'll start buying them alongside the milk and juice, or instead of milk and juice - Buffalo Bleu, Cheddar Cheese Herb, Honey Dijon, Sweet Onion, Barbecue Jalapeno Lime, etc. - they're an excellent accompaniment to fried bologna sandwiches. Much better than the classic stuff you allow yourself occasionally, like Salt & Vinegar, or Russet Rough-cut, or Cape Cod. Cape Cod? Explain that one to me.

And, a Claussen's Kosher Dill pickle half. Or a similar supermarket kosher dill pickle.

For those prepared to sneer, this is not slumming. This is good food: one of the most delicious things you will ever eat. It goes without saying that this is also excellent Great Recession era food, given the price of the ingredients. But, as the New York Times has reported a few weeks ago on the escalating cost of 'cheap cuts' once they become fashionable - pork belly, skirt steak, etc. - be mindful of fluctuations in the price of bologna in the stores. And don't be tempted to try mortadella - it doesn't translate. Use bologna.

A last word on bologna. Shortly after September 11, 2001, I was sent to a small town in Pennsylvania during the Thanksgiving holiday to do a newspaper story about a family whose two sons had been, respectively, at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon during the airplane attacks. Both sons had escaped harm. And of course, the family had much to be thankful for that year, more than most. I stayed at a motel on the highway - there was nothing 'better' in town, which was depressed and coal-based. And there was nowhere to eat, except fast food. So I shopped for a picnic meal in the supermarket down the road.

At the deli counter, a couple was having a quiet discussion about whether they could afford to buy bologna for dinner. I think it was about four dollars a pound. That will always remain for me what it means to be poor.

Relish your sandwiches. And thank you for listening, ma'am.