It’s the day after Turkey Day, so we’re making clubhouse sandwiches. Tall Papa’s scattered siblings and the even more scattered cousins are also making them, from New York to San Francisco. Over the years we’ve honed the recipe as our children drew in their friends for massive sandwich parties. Few gatherings are more ebullient than twelve college students engaged in cookery! One year we did five loaves. Here’s our version if you would like to try it. Feel free to share your variations!
Clubhouse sandwiches
Makes: 25 sandwiches.
- 3 lb meat from a leftover cooked Thanksgiving turkey
- 3 lb bacon (after cooking, about 1 lb 9 oz)
- 2 lb tomatoes cut into thin slices
- 18 oz mayonnaise
- 3 loaves white bread, 24 oz each , sandwich sliced
- 1 head iceberg lettuce
- Celery salt
- Toothpicks
- Fold top sandwich bags for any leftovers
Have assistants toast bread while you assemble sandwiches. Arrange all ingredients in an ergometrically efficient layout. Spread a thin layer of mayonnaise on a slice of toast. Cover this layer with bacon. Cover bacon with tomato slices.
Apply a thin layer of mayonnaise to another slice of toast and place on top of the tomato slices. This middle slice of toast can be one of the loaf’s heels; no one will notice. Apply more mayonnaise and then a layer of turkey.
Sprinkle turkey with celery salt. Add a layer of lettuce and then cover with another toast with mayonnaise. Skewer the sandwich with two toothpicks and slice the sandwich on the diagonal between the toothpicks.
Repeat 25 times.
Allow at least 11/2 hr for cooking bacon and assembly.
Serve with tomato basil soup. Watch out for the toothpicks!
This sandwich was first eaten by Tall Papa’s family in the 1950s at the City of Paris department store restaurant in San Francisco. The City of Paris operated in San Francisco from 1851 until it closed in 1972. They visited this restaurant for lunch during their annual day after Thanksgiving trip to San Francisco for Christmas shopping. Tall Papa’s favorite part of this trip was the stop at Abercrombie and Fitch, in those days, a real toy store. It sold clothes too.
Sandwiches appear to lose some visual aesthetic appeal upon storage but actually greatly improve in flavor. It is therefore important to store properly in the refrigerator. Tall Papa’s mother used waxed paper to wrap the leftover sandwiches. Plastic sandwich bags of the fold top variety are an excellent substitute for waxed paper. Ziplock tops are narrower and generally won’t accommodate the sandwich.
Most persons who have eaten this sandwich would agree that three slices of toast are necessary. From the James Beard Foundation website:
One of Jim’s favorite sandwiches of all time. To make this venerable classic, Beard instructed the assembler to spread crisp toast (white bread only please!) with homemade mayonnaise, top it with freshly cooked, sliced chicken breast, bacon, peeled, ripe tomatoes, and iceberg lettuce. Although a triple-decker sandwich is the norm today, Beard considered the third slice of toast a “horror” and suggested in American Cookery that the responsible party be condemned “to eat three-deckers three times a day the rest of his life.”
Various sources say the sandwich (alternately called a Club house) was created in the kitchens of private men’s clubs, in the club cars of American passenger trains, or at the Saratoga Club, a turn-of-the-century casino in upstate New York. Whatever its origins, the sandwich was well established by 1941 when America’s Cookbook1 gave a detailed recipe (and six variations) specifying that the lettuce extend beyond the toast’s edge and that the sandwich be served while the toast is toasty.
1America’s Cookbook, 1938, The Home Institute of the New York Herald Tribune, Forward by Emily Post, Scribners, New York, Publisher
Oven Fried Bacon
Club house sandwiches need bacon, often in large quantities. This is a convenient way to cook bacon when you need more than one pound at once.
Preheat oven to 375◦F.
2-5 lb sliced bacon
Line the rack of a roasting pan with parchment and pierce it in a few places with a knife to allow the fat to drain. If doing more than two pounds, two roasting pans can be used to increase throughput.
You can also cut second pieces of parchment that fit the pans and lay out the second round of slices while the first round is cooking. The parchment can be used for two to three rounds of baking (with two sets of parchment, all that is usually needed for five pounds of bacon)
Arrange slices in rows, across pan with fat edges slightly overlapping lean edges. If the slices are very asymmetric you may want to flip alternate slices to tile the parchment more completely.
Bake at 375◦F without turning the slices, for 20-25 minutes until bacon is slightly crisp. Cooking is more even if you rotate the pans front to back and top to bottom about the midway point.
DO NOT OVERCOOK.
Drain thoroughly on paper towels.
For a convection oven, use 325◦F