» 3 May 2008
Central Park
... New York's wild heart
» 8 March 2008
An interview with Sir Bernard Lovell
Aged 94, Sir Bernard Lovell has one final fight – to save the pioneering radio telescope that was named after him but now faces closure in budget cuts
» 29 February 2008
Seizure -- the soundtrack
What music do novelists hear when they write? In Erica Wagner's case, timeless tales of love, bewitchment and betrayal
» 1 February 2008
Peter Carey talks about prose, politics, and his passion for Australia
Erica Wagner meets Australia's greatest literary export to discuss his latest novel, His Illegal Self
» 29 September 2007
How to fly a plane
For one Times journalist, piloting a Russian aerobatic trainer was the next best thing to being a bird
» 1 September 2007
The Secrets of Brooklyn Bridge
Erica Wagner reveals our love affair with New York’s enduring gateway to the world
» 18 October 2000
Divinely inspired: Philip Pullman
Condemned by The Catholic Herald as "the stuff of nightmares", Philip Pullman's trilogy of children's novels, His Dark Materials, draws on a tradition of religious dissent that goes back as far as Blake and Milton
» 10 April 2000
Ted Hughes's archive opened at Emory University
» 16 March 2000
William Maxwell and The New Yorker
... an interview in New York, the last Maxwell gave
» 28 January 2000
You have to be Maddy to sing this
Maddy Prior's voice put English folk music into the charts. Now, 30 years later, she talks to Erica Wagner about her latest work
» 9 September 1999
Bridges span both space and spirit
Down the ages, structures uniting two sides have retained their ability to enthral and impress
» 12 August 1999
An interview with Alan Garner
'I never considered myself a writer for children. A book that can only be read by children isn't a good book.
» 29 June 1999
A hero whose time has come
Profile of Sir Ernest Shackleton
» 24 June 1999
Beyond the Border, 1999
The ancient art of storytelling is celebrated next month at a Welsh festival. Erica Wagner prepares to listen
» 22 April 1999
Let me tell you a story...
an interview with tale-teller Ben Haggarty
» 22 April 1999
Skellig's garage is out the back...
An interview with David Almond
» 9 January 1999
Death school
Ultimately we will all end up in the undertaker's hands, but what sort of people choose to dedicate their lives to our deaths? Erica Wagner visited the College of Funeral Sciences to find out
» 11 September 1998
Poetic giant with his feet on the ground
an interview with Seamus Heaney
» 4 April 1998
Home comforts
His debut novel of love and life during the American Civil War, Cold Mountain, became a modern classic overnight. Erica Wagner talks to Charles Frazier, an author inspired by the beauty of his birthplace and history of his ancestors
» 28 February 1998
'Thomas More's London could be the city of God'
Peter Ackroyd takes Erica Wagner on a tour of the mean streets and divine architecture of the 16th century
Published on 1 Jul 2008 in Real Simple
The Perfect Tunafish Sandwich
The summer I was seven, my parents and I drove from New York City, where we lived, to the tiny rural town of Quechee, Vermont, to visit friends. My dad’s car was an ancient Volkswagen Beetle, white, convertible, with cracks in the floorboards and red vinyl seats whose sticky scentand rough texture I still vividly remember. And I remember, when we arrived at the house (which was in the middle of the woods), a swimming pond, and, in the kitchen, a milkshake machine—a real one, a Hamilton Beach. There were two kids, both much older, and the younger one, fourteen, put on his favorite records for me—The Beach Boys, Seals & Crofts—and suddenly I felt like I understood what music was all about.
It was idyllic, that house and the land and the ancient, beneficent trees. But we couldn’t hang around all day every day, so early one morning my parents took me off to explore the countryside. My mom held a map in her lap; my dad held the wheel. I sat in back, looking down through the floorboards as we drove. Soon enough we found a glass-blowing factory, and then an old forge; my dad and I pulled polished stones from the bed of a fast-flowing stream. Anything seemed possible. Life was an adventure.
But after a morning of adventuring, we needed lunch. We looked for a place to stop, but found nothing. I was hungry, and then hungrier. I remember my parents laughing as, in the depths of verdant Vermont, for what seemed like hour after hour, we failed to find anything to eat. And then, around the bend in the road, my dad spotted a white clapboard building with a neat sign hanging from the eaves proclaiming it to be a diner. I didn’t think so—diners are streamlined and silver, I thought, not neat, old-fashioned little houses—but never mind. We parked and went in, where we were welcomed by a smiling middle-aged lady with a lilting accent. She and her husband, the owners, were Swedish, and to this day we still refer to them as Mr. and Mrs. Swedish.
They sat us down, and, without consulting the menu, I ordered a tuna fish sandwich. I liked tuna then. I like it now, though these days I might eat it seared or raw or out of a pretty Italian jar with extra virgin olive oil. But back then, as a kid, the tuna sandwich was my default. And that day, I needed something fast and reliable, something that wouldn’t disappoint.
Happily, when my sandwich arrived, disappointment was the furthest thing from my mind. In fact, until that day and from that day on, that sandwich was the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten. Ambrosia couldn’t match it; it was perfection on white toast, bound with mayonnaise. I remember the smiling Swedishes refilling my parents’ coffee cups; I remember the sunlight through their yellow curtains. How much mayo? How much fine chopped celery? Was the tuna from a can packed with oil or water? I have no idea.
But I do know this: For years afterwards, I’ve both searched for and tried to replicate that sandwich. Sometimes the search is idle; barely aware of it, I get myself a tuna fish sandwich and eat it, reading the newspaper or sitting at my desk, and halfway through, the miraculous sandwich of my childhood springs into my mind and the sandwich I’m eating turns to dust in my mouth. Then (this is the trajectory) I want that sandwich. A simple, perfect tuna salad sandwich, I’ll tell myself, must be out there somewhere.
So I’ll hit the road looking. I live in England now, and over here in Blighty, I’m sorry to report, they like to put sweet corn into tuna salad. Since no tuna salad made with sweet corn can be considered in the Miracle Tuna Stakes (my son, born and raised in England, thinks there’s nothing wrong with sweet corn in tuna, and of course I love him anyway), my bouts of searching for a restaurant that will replicate the Swedish’s achievement have been mostly confined to trips Stateside. But I’m indefatigable when I’m there. I’m not looking for some fancy bistro, mind you; that place in Vermont was exactly the opposite of fancy. In fact, I might find myself, at lunchtime, peering through the doorway of a hole in the wall with a neon sigh in the window flashing COLD BEER, and think, Who knows? This might be it!
It never is. The lettuce is limp, the bread stale; the tuna is too salty, too gummy, or overwhelmed by stringy little bricks of celery—tuna that would be happier still in its can. Or, at one of those New York downtown joints that pretends to be a diner but never really is (macchiato in a diner? I think not), it might be tricked up, laced with paprika, sprinkled with sesame seeds, served on a brioche when I’d hoped for the stalwart comfort of plain white toast. Even on the rare occasion the sandwich is fine, it’s just that—fine—yet hardly the revelation I’m hoping to recapture.
At this point I usually turn back to my own kitchen, thinking surely I can do better myself. I’m a reasonably confident cook, after all, and just how hard can a tuna sandwich be? Plenty hard, it turns out, if you are after perfection, chasing the memory that changed your life. And sometimes, I admit, I go off-piste and abandon the search completely, loading my own tuna salads with capers, olives, thinly sliced roasted red peppers, homemade mayo laced with lime, scatterings of fresh coriander leaves. But then I remember what I’m supposed to be doing, and I’m seduced again into trying to replicate the mythic lunch of my youth.
I’ve decided that both proportion and texture are critical. So to start with, I choose tuna packed in oil—none of this slenderizing water nonsense, which leads to tuna that’s dry-ish and tastes of nothing. For mayo I stick to Hellman’s, and I think celery is a must-add —though not too much, and this does mean taking the trouble to de-string the pesky stuff. I’m certain the Swedishes were on the celery team; without it, you can’t even have a discussion of texture, surely? A little salt, a little pepper, and maybe, just maybe, a wee squeeze of lemon.
I’ve come close with this version, but never close enough. And after that, it’s a guessing game. Once I even threw everything in the food processor, thinking that a few judicious pulses would get me where I wanted to go. The result was gloop—nothing like the Famous Swedish Sandwich. I’ve mashed with a fork, I’ve crumbled with my fingers, I’ve diced celery so fine you could pass it through a sieve. I’ve cut the mayo with a spoonful of sour cream (neat idea, no?)…and yet. No matter what I do, the perfect tuna sandwich eludes me.
The other day, I actually considered giving up, though not out of a sense of defeat. I was making a tuna sandwich for my son—standing at the counter pouring, yes, sweet corn kernels into a bowl. I was hungry, but I wasn’t sure what for; this happens often to me. I thought of my father, who died last year. And I thought, once again, of that tuna salad sandwich I ate that day in Vermont, and then of the Volkswagen, and my parents laughing up front and me rattling around in the back, not wearing a seatbelt, because no one did back then. I remembered the trees blurred and bending as my Dad took the curves, and the diner appearing like an oasis, and my absolute hunger as I waited, at seven years old, for my lunch. And I realized then that it wasn’t the sandwich that was perfect: It was everything. The day, the place, the drive, my love for my parents, and the feeling, perhaps for the first time in my life, of absolute hunger followed by absolute satiety.
Hunger, of course, never really goes. Hunger for tuna fish; hunger for love. A hunger for the perfect moment you wish you could resurrect as easily as you can make a sandwich. But maybe savoring a memory doesn’t have to mean reconstructing it; maybe, in fact, that constant attempt at reconstruction keeps you from relishing what’s happening now – now, and next week, and next year. So that day, standing in my kitchen, I decided: From then on, I would try be hungry for, and satisfied by, only the present and the future. As for the past, I would let it stay happily—idyllically—in the past.
