This Is The Perfect Bite Of Food. I’m Not Taking Rebuttals At This Time.
by Audie Metcalf
You’ve just made yourself a sandwich.
Actually. Scratch that. Someone has just made you a sandwich.
You wander into the kitchen.
You see all the various sandwich-trappings spread pell mell about the cutting board and counter top. A hunk of iceberg lettuce. Some deli meats. An open bag of sliced sourdough. The remaining half of a red onion, maybe. Pickles, certainly.
You spy your sandwich, sliced on the diagonal, still sitting on the cutting board. You furrow your brow, confused as to why your sandwich wasn’t plated, anointed with your favorite salt and vinegar chips and handed to you along with a giant mason jar of water with crushed ice and a straw just as you would do for him when you make him a sandwich but you digress because you and he have different love languages and you accept that sort of.
Anyway we’re in the kitchen.
Your eyes are fixed on your lovingly-made sandwich, but they dart away almost immediately, instead focusing on the fat, heirloom tomato that was previously sliced into, only once. Well, twice if you count that first slice where you have to get rid of the butt of the tomato. You know the butt. Regardless, this is a beautiful tomato.
Your mouth lightly waters.
Next, you address yourself to the glass jar of Hellman’s mayonnaise, knife still inside the jar.
And it is now that you slice a thick round of tomato (this time with the correct serrated knife not the STEAK KNIFE that he used earlier), sprinkle onto it a hefty amount of flaky Maldon salt, and then smear on a verging-on-obscene amount of mayonnaise.
You bring your thick, mayonnaise-smothered tomato slice to your mouth, and you bite into it, hunched over the cutting board, juices spilling everywhere, including down your arm, holding it almost like a piece of bread, possibly closing your eyes when you taste that saline saltiness and eggy mayonnaise mingling with the tomato which, on certain days, will also include the flavor of the fucking sun itself.
And it is in that uncertainty that we find our perfect bite.
Because this bite isn’t really possible in November. Or April. And even in July, it’s never a guarantee. We can HOPE that we will slice into her plump, red bottom and she will be ripe and bright and spilling her juices but we aren’t ever fully able to predict it. The marketplace will dictate it for us. The weather that week. The cloud cover. The gentleness with which she was plucked from her vine.
Because when our only options are a mealy Roma in December, or some horrifying supermarket Beefsteak in March, our perfect bite is not available to us.
And in that scarcity, our desire builds.
And so when we do have those moments of juicy, eggy, crunchy alchemy, we are all reminded that we really have no control in this world. We have merely a sense of control.
Bon appetit.
PS: Duke’s mayonnaise also works here but under no circumstances can you use a plastic squeeze bottle of any kind, thank you.
Audie Metcalf is the Editor-in-chief of The Candidly, and lives in LA with her family. You can find more of her articles here.
