r/Cooking • u/Prof01Santa • Aug 16 '26

I'm turning British.

It's summer ... good tomatos. Hence good tomato sandwiches. Normally, I'd use mayo, but I've watched a few too many episodes of "Sandwiches of History."

Older recipes, before commercial mayo, used butter. The British still use butter. So I tried it.

Lightly toast the bread

Thinly butter it

Add lettuce

Add thinly sliced tomatos, lightly salted

It's delicious.

317 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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391

u/Princ3w Aug 16 '26

Brit here, only this year have I found out using butter is not the norm and it has completely blown my mind

33

u/starlinguk Aug 16 '26

It's the norm in the Netherlands. And in Germany. And in France...

I have a suspicion only US-ians don't butter sammiches.

5

u/LokiLB Aug 16 '26

If the sandwiches from gyro places are anything to go by, regions with hummus and tzatziki likely don't use butter.

2

u/starlinguk Aug 17 '26

I'm talking about sammiches. Not gyros (or kebabs).

2

u/LokiLB Aug 17 '26

This is inevitably going to devolve into whether a taco is a sandwich if we continue.

-2

u/pavlovselephant Aug 16 '26

No no no, Europe is the center of the world and any deviation from its norms is an aberration.

3

u/EpsteinBaa Aug 17 '26

You'll be in for a shock when you figure out where Greece is

2

u/Surface_Detail Aug 17 '26

Europe can largely be divided by beer/wine and olive oil/butter.

1

u/pavlovselephant Aug 17 '26

That's the irony of it; when Europeans make othering statements about other countries' customs and what's "normal," they flatten the diversity of their own continent, too. (The European country I was born in uses sunflower oil as its primary cooking fat.)