We’ve reached the part of the season where minds start drifting toward the thought of sandwiches in little green wrappers. But I’m not writing to tell how much better the Masters egg salad is to its version of pimento cheese (it just is), but instead to share obsessive thoughts about the greatest of all golf course lunch options.
The club sandwich.
As with everything, there is debate over the origin of the club sandwich. Two clubs in New York – the Union Club in New York City in 1889 and the Saratoga Club in Saratoga Springs in 1894 – lay claim as the creator of what has become a menu staple in the grill rooms at most clubs and resorts across the globe since it was popularized at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. It basically is defined by luncheon meat between slices of toasted bread.
But it’s not that simple and every club seems to have its own version of the club, most of them perfectly fine but few of them ever perfect. The majority make the mistake of trying to be too fancy – gussying it up with exotic breads, cheeses, greens or meats. If that’s your thing, by all means enjoy it. But it’s just not a true club in my book.
Granted, my book is very, very specific. Much like your mom’s spaghetti sauce or grandmother’s meatloaf, our palates are often trained to prefer the familiar that we grew up with. And I grew up with what was called the “junior* club sandwich” at Willow Oaks Country Club in Richmond, Virginia. And while I’ve eaten club sandwiches at many, many, many dozens of clubs and restaurants all over the world – most of them satisfying in their own ways – all are judged by the original Willow Oaks standard and few have ever lived up to it.
(* – I don’t recall there being a senior club)
It took me years of trial and mostly error to finally get it close to exactly right. Most common issues were too much meat, too crisp bacon or too thick a slice of tomato.
As I scarfed down through the years literally hundreds of those junior clubs – always with an ice-cold Coca-Cola, chips and a pecan ball (vanilla ice cream covered in crushed pecans and smothered in warm melted caramel with a dollop of whipped cream and cherry on top) for dessert – I didn’t take the time to reverse engineer its ingredients so I could replicate it at home. That was a costly youthful mistake believing I’d always get to satisfy the required monthly minimum on clubhouse food on my parents’ membership number.
It took me years of trial and mostly error to finally get it close to exactly right. Most common issues were too much meat, too crisp bacon or too thick a slice of tomato. But since that eureka moment of discovering the proper proportions and one simple missing piece (the proper cheese), I have been able to satisfy that club sandwich craving after life took me far away from the mixed grill room at Willow Oaks.
The recipe is simple but exacting:
Follow those directions precisely and I promise you will have the perfect club sandwich.
Now if only I can figure out how to replicate those pecan balls.
Scott Michaux
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