Yesterday’s lunch was a 5-ingredient ham sandwich: ham, cheese, bread, mayo, and mustard. If each of those 5 ingredients were an olympic athlete, they’d all be Simone Biles because they were all the absolute best at what they do, and all extremely deserving of corporate sponsorships.
Today’s lunch was also the same as yesterday’s lunch. That’s how perfect this sandwich was to me. Anytime I ever want a snack, I almost always want it to be a piece of ham. Some people are chips snackers. Others are fruit snackers. I am a Ham Snacker™.
Poland really knows what they’re doing when it comes to ham, and most likely other things too. I was in Greenpoint yesterday getting a tattoo touched up, and afterward I walked to pick up some of The Good Ham from one of my favorite places in this entire garbage town, Nassau Meat Market.
For all of the maybe 8 years I’ve been buying ham from there, I thought it was called Kiszka Meat Market, because apparently I’m bad at reading awnings.
When I googled Kiszka just now to confirm spelling, because I’m a journalist with integrity, Google corrected me and now here we are.
“So then what does ‘kiszka’ mean?” I wondered.
Anyway, my ultimate green flag when shopping nearly anywhere is if there are old people also shopping there. The older, the better. In this case, I have never stepped inside Intestine Meat Market and not been the youngest person there by at least 20 years, and it feels great.
Everyone shopping and working there also speaks Polish, which at first was a little intimidating, but if you walk in anywhere and confidently point to a ham, chances are things will turn out well for you.
I also confidently pointed to a block of cheese along a row of cheese blocks that looked mostly identical. But the one I liked had the most holes and brown around the outside, which I was hoping meant that it was smoked. And it was!
One pound of The Good Ham, fatty and full of flavor, is $8.99 - up from $5.99 when I first started shopping there. One pound of commercially processed ham square, uniform and microplasticky, is more expensive than that (although to be clear, I also eat said ham square).
I got 1/4 pound of the cheese, which came out to $1.81. If you’re wondering why you’re wasting a nice Thursday afternoon reading about the price of my deli meats, I am too.
The mustard, which I’ve had in my fridge for 3 years (not exaggerating, I remember the day I bought it) is a favorite because it tastes as assertive as the German language sounds. It came from Schaller & Weber on the Upper East Side, another amazing old deli. John and I lovingly refer to it as “sharf” and nothing else. What a joy to find extra sharf. If a mustard isn’t sharf enough, I say, don’t even bother.
The next ingredient I’ll bore you with (tbh you can skim this whole thing if you want, no worries at all), is the mayo. My sister Amanda sold me on buying the more expensive squirt bottles, and it is pretty convenient (even though I suspect the recipe is not the same as the tub). It’s pretty convenient, at least, until you get to the end, when your bread ends up looking like this when trying to negotiate the mayo out:
And lastly, the bread. The most important part of any sandwich. I feel like I’ve already written a lot about ingredients and Polish elders without getting to the point of any of this, so I’ll spare you the poetics about Radio Bakery, my favorite bakery in New York. All of their bread has a signature chewiness that I’m addicted to, and the owner Kelly is a sunbeam of a human. This particular bread is a whole wheat sourdough.
Now, what all six of you read this newsletter for: the point of this. Just show me the recipe!!! I spread the bread with mayo, then mustard, piled high with ham and cheese. I prefer a rectangle cut because it feels more cute to me, don’t make me explain. Also so that each half has equal amounts of top crust and bottom crust. I feel passionately about this.
I’ve cooked a lot of dinners since the last time I wrote in January, but haven’t felt motivated to share any of them. The freelance industry is a little bit on fire, so work has been slow, the meaning of it all seems either lost or pointless, and I’ve been questioning my self-worth every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday on a weekly basis (Sundays are reserved for playing Tears of the Kingdom and baking something).
Call it a slump, call it SAD, I don’t know, but I have a bit more work now and a whiff of change is in the air, so things are getting better. I’m also embracing my wavy hair journey (I bought mousse!) so, you know… growth, self-acceptance, etc etc.
The last thing I’ll say about this sandwich is that it reminds me of when my dad used to come home from cooking at his fancy restaurants late at night, cooking filet mignons and chilean sea bass and these incredible restaurant-y sauces that have like 26 ingredients and 4-step processes to create. He’d usually ask me or my mom to make him a ham sandwich: mayo, mustard, ham, and kraft singles.
“What’s the point of owning your own restaurant if you don’t let your diet become 96% beef tenderloin and top shelf vodka?” I used to wonder.
I get it now, though, as I’m testing and developing for cookbooks and making rabbit-stuffed agnolotti and tuna steaks and saffron risotto at 10 am. There isn’t really anything to get, actually. Just that sometimes nothing is better than a ham sandwich.
I really haven’t acquired too many new things these past few months, but just over the weekend John and I were gifted these amazing stamps by our friend Greg, who bought them at the amazing Casey Rubber Stamps in the East Village. This snippet from their website (I’m actually surprised they even had one) tells you all you need to know.
I had never stamped a stamp of this quality before, so I was not expecting the rush of joy and delight I felt when I inked them up and stamped. The detail needs to be seen to be believed.
Greg told us he got the fork + spoon with me in mind, and the little man with John in mind, but little does he know is that the combination of the two is actually me when I’m hungry.
Loved every word of this!!
And the finale with the stamps…. Chef’s kiss to you!