Sandwiches on the Sweet Side

When my husband, Simon, and I were just married, he worked in Hollywood as an assistant director on low-budget films. “Low budget” at that time didn’t mean $5 million as opposed to $50 million. It meant a budget in the mere thousands, 18-hour workdays and deferred pay, assuming the movie made any money at all. How did the producers ever get their nonunion crews — essentially volunteers — to work so hard for so little reward? Food, of course.

“Craft services” is the film industry’s name for the people who provide a steady supply of snacks and grab-and-go meals on the set, encompassing breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between. Los Angeles County has an entire mini-economy wrapped up in feeding actors and crew. The food produced by the many craft services companies who serve Hollywood productions is some of the best stuff you will ever eat anywhere. It’s especially important when filming movies with scant funding, and producers will unthinkingly spend a sizeable chunk of their teensy budget on quality craft services in order to keep morale up.

Simon would regularly bring home the best bagels with schmear, the most delicious breakfast burritos and the most delectable wraps and sandwiches. Everything was top-quality and anything but boring. It was during this time — the latter half of 1995, before we had even celebrated our six-month anniversary — that I ate the best sandwich of my entire life. (I can also recount the second-best and third-best sandwiches, but maybe those treasured culinary memories are best left for another time.) It was a curried chicken salad sandwich on crusty, whole-grain peasant bread. The filling had big chunks of white-meat chicken in a creamy, mildly spiced curry sauce with grated carrots, plump raisins and the occasional almond. It was on the sweeter side of savory with a hint of cinnamon or another hard-to-place spice — cardamom, perhaps.

I’ve tried to recreate this sandwich many, many times and I’ve always failed. On the upside, I’ve made countless wonderful chicken salad sandwiches in the attempt, even if they weren’t as good as the Ultimate Chicken Curry Sandwich of Legend. I tried it again this week and got something — well, very different, but still absolutely scrumptious. I’ll share the recipe with you, which can be eaten in a sandwich or wrap, or, if you can’t wait for bread, gobbled straight from the mixing bowl. It’s a balance of sweet and salty, with maybe sweet winning out, but chicken especially lends itself to sweet accompaniments.

Sweet Carrot Chicken Salad

I started with leftovers from a chicken I’d roasted the previous evening using one of my condiment sauces that can’t be recreated. (It was a combination of teriyaki sauce, mild red salsa and onion dip, since you asked. Sounds weird, tastes great.) I had a couple of chicken legs left with plenty of meat on them, easily enough for two sandwiches. I removed the skin and separated the meat from the bone, cutting it into small bits.

Next, I grated a medium carrot and added it to the mix, along with a scant ¼ cup each of raisins and pecan pieces. (Carrots and raisins are natural partners, and the pecans give the sandwich a nice crunchy element.) Then I added 1 tablespoon each of brown sugar and mayonnaise, along with — bear with me, here — a dollop of sour cream onion dip. This might not seem like the proper thing to put in chicken salad but the creamy, salty flavor of this dip, usually reserved for potato chips, is the perfect counterpoint to the other ingredients. I also found that the onion dip added just the right amount of saltiness and I didn’t need to add any additional salt.

I don’t usually have powdered curry in the house (although I’m seeing that I really ought to keep some on hand for just such sandwich-related emergencies) and it’s obviously kind of hard to make a curry sandwich without curry. However, I did add 1 teaspoon of fresh ginger paste and ¼ teaspoon each of cinnamon and cardamom, which lent the filling the necessary bit of warmth on the tongue. Then I stirred everything together until it was well-coated in creamy sauce and the raisins, carrots, nuts and spices were evenly distributed. Voila! Sandwich time!

I served it on honey whole-wheat bread and ate the sandwich on my back deck, basking in the spring sunshine and watching a turkey vulture drift across the sky. My daughter came along and joined the sandwich party. I considered our tasty lunch, inspired by the chicken salad I had eaten 27 years ago in our sun-soaked California kitchen, happy to see my young husband after his long day on the set. I thought about how that moment was connected to this new moment with my daughter, now not much younger than I was when I got married. It just goes to show what can be accomplished with a really good chicken sandwich. It can bend space and time, plucking on your heartstrings while it pleases your taste buds.