Happy World Sandwich Day! Today, November 3, the noble art of sandwich with sliced bread, in honor of the birth not of the person who invented it, since this eating things between bread and bread is as old as the bread itself and here we would have to go back to the Egyptians and Sumerians, but of the person who popularized it: the IV count of Sandwich, John Montagu, who apart from holding important political and military positions in 18th century Great Britain, was a fierce fan of card games and betting. Legend has it that his games could last for days and, in order to continue eating without leaving the table or dirtying the cards, the count got into the habit of asking his servants for a couple of slices of bread to take the meat for dinner home. mouth. He popularized this custom among members of high society, with whom he lived surrounded.
Lord Montagu was once what a celebrity uploading one story to Instagram with a trick gastro: a role model for the plebs, who from then on did not begin to consume something that did not exist before, but rather renamed it and felt proud to ask for it and show it. She conferred status on him. The mechanisms of present modernity are as old as the mountains. If you take a look, you will see that Lord Sandwich was born on the 13th, and not on the 3rd of November, 1718, but since that day was already occupied by the celebration of goodness and wine tourism, I suppose someone somewhere would decide to relocate the theme of sandwich.
Five are, perhaps, the most famous sandwiches in the world: the Club, the Cuban, the tuna sandwich, the croque monsieur and, of course, the mixed one. But today I come to sing praises to the bikini.
My (pan)egyric includes atomic bombs, public scandals, navels in the sun, nights out and large quantities of melted cheese.
Set yourself on July 1, 1946, a year after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That day, explosive devices rain from the sky over a small coral reef atoll in the Marshall Islands, where Truman’s US government is conducting nuclear tests. The name of one of those small rocks in the middle of the sea is a combination of the words “surface” and “coconut” which, in a local Malayo-Polynesian language, sounds like something close to Bikini.
Five days later, on the other side of the globe, the model show scheduled at the grand Melitor hotel in Paris is about to be suspended because no professional model dares to wear the event’s star outfit in public. Its designer, Louis Réard, is preparing to present the smallest two-piece swimsuit in history, made of only 76 square centimeters of fabric that leaves the navel and buttocks visible, and to such an extent is he aware of the scandal which is about to cause him to baptize his creation with the name Bikini, the same name of the atoll that has been making headlines in the international press for days. It’s Micheline Bernardini, a stripper 19-year-old casino player, who goes down in history for being the first woman to wear a bikini in public. Indeed, the garment was a bomb that revolutionized the fashion world forever!
When in 1953, seven years later, four entrepreneurs of Belgian origin decided to land on Diagonal Avenue in Barcelona and open a new party room that included a dance room, games, terrace, restaurant and minigolf, the name they chose had to be the height of the scandal and the shock that they want to cause in Barcelona nights. With more eyesight than a hawk and smarter than hunger, the businessmen named what quickly became the sensation of Barcelona nights as Sala Bikini.
The snack menu at the local bar is full of the most cosmopolitan international hits of the moment, but the use of foreign languages to promote them is not at all well regarded in the midst of Franco’s regime and that is a problem when it comes to naming its particular version. simplified, adapted to the rudimentary kitchen of a bar, the croque monsieur French, the legendary ham and cheese sandwich grilled with bechamel, so they decide to call it, simply, “the house sandwich.”
The sandwich becomes as famous as the nightclub and word spreads like wildfire. Their clients flit around Barcelona asking everywhere to make them “the sandwich they make in Bikini” or “the Bikini sandwich.” And this is how this bomb of enjoyment arrives at Catalan Friday dinners with little work and a lot of life in the present, under the name of bikini.
A bikini is not a mixed sandwich. It may have the same ingredients, it may taste the same, but it is not a copy, but the result of a particular sensational story. As Pep Antoni Roig beautifully says, the bikini is a bit like Proust’s madeleine for Catalans, a gastronomic way of remembering childhood: “The ‘bikini’ is the same as the Dalsy, which is not forgotten, and at the same time the antithesis of the fluorine, whom no one longs for.”
What I said: Happy World Sandwich Day!
#bikini #mixed #sandwich